Self-driving cars seem to be far from being fully automated, as more adjustments are needed to reach that goal. For example, the Full-Self-Driving technology of Tesla is actually not capable of driving on its own, and the Super Cruise of Cadillac is only applicable to use on highways.
Also, startup companies trying to join the self-driving cars industry have yet to offer anything for sale to the public. But autonomous race cars should be easier to make as there are no intersections and stoplights to consider, right?
It might sound easy, but the truth is an autonomous vehicle in a racetrack is also challenging to make. For one, an autonomous race car recently made headlines when it took a sharp right and accelerated directly to the track's wall at the start of the Roborace on Thursday.
The event was live-streamed via Twitter, and many cannot help but laugh at the mishap of the autonomous car., according to The Drive.
A Self-Driving Car Crashed Into the Racetrack
Roborace is the world first driver-less/autonomous motorsports category.
This is one of their first live-broadcasted events.
This was the second run.
It drove straight into a wall. pic.twitter.com/ss5R2YVRi3 — Ryan (@dogryan100) October 29, 2020
During the Roborace's Second Beta on Thursday, October 29, the autonomous race car from the Swiss team Acronis SIT Autonomous lined up to start a lap. But an unexpected event happened when it turned 90 degrees to the right and accelerated into the wall instead of going straight ahead, Business Insider reported.
In a screenshot of the statement by one of the SIT Autonomous engineers posted on Twitter by @dogryan100, he said that the problem happened before the start of the race. It was during the initialization lap that something occurred, which caused the steering wheel to go NaN and was locked to the maximum value to the right.
Despite the team's efforts to steer it to the left, it became hard to do so as the steering wheel was locked. The car did not want to go that way as its trajectory at that tie was good. As of now, the team is putting a lot of effort into understanding the direct cause of the mishap during which there was a short spike of the controller's inputs. They hope to fix it as soon as possible before the second round of the race begins.
One of the engineers wrote this on Reddit giving an explanation as to the reason the car crashed (First video) pic.twitter.com/cQvZ5er4oy — Ryan (@dogryan100) October 30, 2020
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Roborace: The World's First Driverless Motorsports Category
Roborace is a new autonomous racing series that is still in its testing phase. It started its Season Alpha last year and just recently started the Season Beta.
The idea of the race is for each team to develop its own autonomous-driving software that runs similar vehicles. Presently, Roborace uses cars that are called DevBot 2.0.
The video posted on Twitter is just one of the few embarrassing moments of Roborace cars since it started. But that does not mean that they did not have good laps. One of the autonomous vehicles successfully drove up the hill climb at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2019. It is still an impressive feat for an autonomous car.
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