Roborace car to be powered by super computer

The world’s most powerful engine for in-vehicle artificial intelligence will power Roborace cars

Cars in the driverless race series Roborace will be equipped with NVIDIA’s DRIVE PX2 – the world’s most powerful engine for in-vehicle artificial intelligence. 

The PX 2 can fuse data from 12 cameras and can combine information from a wide array of sensors, including radar, LIDAR, cameras, GPS, and high-definition maps. This allows algorithms to accurately understand the full 360 degree environment around the car to produce a robust representation, including static and dynamic objects.

The Drive PX 2 is also capable of up to 24 trillion operations a second for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, providing 'supercomputer-class' performance. 

The announcement was made by Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive of NVIDIA, and Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of Roborace, during a keynote session at the GPU Technology Conference.

Sverdlov said: “ We are happy to announce NVIDIA as our technology partner. DRIVE PX2 has outstanding performance to support advanced autonomous algorithm which will be used by Roborace teams.”

The Roborace championship is a partnership between Formula E and Kinetik. The Roboraces will be scheduled before each Formula E race, in major cities around the world and will be televised in over 100 countries to millions of viewers globally starting from 2016/17. All the teams will have identical cars ensuring that the only competitive advantage can be gained through superior real time computing analysis in a contest of the most advanced technological minds.

Sverdlov added: “The Roborace is a celebration of the groundbreaking technology and innovation that exists today. I passionately believe in the near future all of the world’s vehicles will be powered by electricity transforming the environment and our safety. The Roborace is a wonderful way to humanise that and share it with millions of people around the world.”