The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League competition took place last weekend at the Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Although each Dallara superformula car looked like an ordinary racing vehicle, there was one notable difference: they were completely driverless and were instead controlled by autonomous artificial intelligence software developed by eight university-affiliated teams. A series of sensors were placed where a human driver would sit, including cameras, radar, lidar, GPS and an inertial measurement unit, along with the computing power to process the data the sensors provided in real time.

The challenge for each team was to develop AI software that would allow the cars to perform on the track, complete the course in the fastest possible time, overtake opponents and make strategic decisions to win races. Once cars are on the track, no human intervention is allowed. Instead, each car makes its own AI-based decisions about how fast to drive, when to brake, which racing line to take, when to pass its opponents and what risk it is willing to expose itself to, which can be higher or higher. lower than for human drivers.

The hope is that by creating a high-tech testbed with a competitive element and a prize fund, research into driverless AI will accelerate, leading to trickle-down technology that could become commonplace in future self-driving cars, logistics infrastructure, agriculture and other robotic systems. “The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League is all about road safety,” said Tom McCarthy, executive director of ASPIRE, part of the Abu Dhabi government's Advanced Technology Research Council, which created the competition. “We believe there is an opportunity to leverage the technology developed in autonomous robotics and AI to develop the co-pilot capabilities that we can put in street cars to prevent accidents,” he says.

Whatever the outcome, the teams involved are already enthusiastic about future applications outside of racing. “Obviously there's a research element to this,” says Lawrence Walter, team principal at CODE19 Racing, an Indiana racing team affiliated with Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. “There are a lot of interesting things when you compare the performance of AI to that of humans, which, I think, can be applied more broadly to computer science,” he says. Walter hopes that in the future the team's Maveric AI can also have applications beyond racing and cars that we can apply the expertise we have to any problem,” he says, adding: “Maybe it's climate change . We don't know yet exactly what we're focusing on, we just know that our Maveric AI is a highly advanced modular system and that we can apply its learning nodes, prediction nodes and perception to a whole range of grand challenges.”

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