If it weren't for regulations, i am sure F1 would already be like this or close to it. Compared to public traffic, race tracks are quite easy to master for AI. They had active suspension systems and traction control in the early nineties where the driver was already reduced to mostly just pushing the pedal and steering but the FIA banned most of those driver aids because real human driving skill and error is just more exciting to the general public.
> Compared to public traffic, race tracks are quite easy to master for AI.
It may be easier to go around a track than drive around a crowded city, but reaching any level of mastery is going to be pushing it. The best racing AIs so far have only reached the level of an average amateur racing driver, doing hotlaps alone in one circuit.
To my best knowledge, no-one has ever put two or more AIs racing on one track. In computer games and simulations, all the AIs either cheat (ie. drive with physics disabled on a pre-set track when they aren't close to the player) or are terribly bad, causing collisions whenever something unexpected happens (e.g. overtaking attempts by the player). I have never raced against a simulator AI that was any good (and I've tried a lot of different games and I do competitive sim racing).
If and when this series will take place, it will be pushing the state of the art forward. There's nothing like it in existance.
This will be very good practice for autonomous drivers. Multi-agent collision avoidance is a very difficult research problem and needs to be solved before there can be large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles. I presume the cars will be broadcasting their positions (and perhaps even their intentions) to others.
>FIA banned most of those driver aids because real human driving skill and error is just more exciting to the general public.
no, they banned it for the same reason they banned all other neat stuff like 6 wheels, ground effect aerodynamics, unrestricted turbos resulting in 1300HP, engine capacity/fuel flow, actually ALL engine development (everyone uses same engine). Cost, smaller teams had trouble keeping up with R&D.
F1 is boring right now, everyone drives same engine, same tires. Formula E is even worse - everyone drives same car.
> Some might say it's not much of a sport anyway, but it seems popular
Yeah, that is another argument. Not many people understand that driving a F1 car is hugely physically challenging though and drivers need to be in top shape. Us mere mortals would be exhausted after 2 laps and could not hold our head straight for even one high speed corner.
Never mind that we wouldn't have the technique and balls to be able to drive around one high speed corner.
Watch Richard Hammond, who's spent more time than 99.9% of us driving fast cars round racetracks, spend an entire day and not getting it quite right: https://youtu.be/EGUZJVY-sHo
Exactly. Anyone who has driven a go-kart in an open track knows how incredibly tough and exhausting that is already, I can't even imagine scaling those forces to 300km/h+.
So who is going to be interested in motorsports when in 15+ years AI beats the best human drivers? Not only the races will be boring (cheering for an automaton Lewiz Hamiltobot?), but all humans would look like total losers.
The "easy" way for AI is to record all telemetry of a super fast human lap and then tweak it with machine learning for subsequent runs. No human is going to be 100% consistent all the time.
A robotic car could do something no car driven by a human could ever do: drive without fear of losing their life. Which would allow it to take a lot more risk. Humans continuously balance risk and caution, with racing and other dangerous sports having the 'risk' portion of the equation defined as 'you die'. For a robotic car such a risk would be non-existent.
Sure, but would you watch it for getting adrenaline rush from racing? At some point it would end up as who has the best "non-linear controller" wins (i.e. human is your non-linear controller now), then all of them will have it and all the tweaks will be in some optimization techniques and different objective functions.
And your objective function would have to feature penalty for "killing yourself" (well, do you want to rebuild your car after each turn? I guess not...), so I would expect the cars will be actually pretty slow due to this initially, like Google's own.
Human motorsports face the problem that all physical records were shattered and humans already crossed the edge of their abilities (i.e. driving 250mph on the ovals is the limit before drivers pass out)[1]. So yes, there could be something interesting for a normal human to see that robotic cars suddenly could push 300, 350, 400mph etc. But what would this do to human motorsports? Relegate them to 'meh' category, basically killing the whole sport as humans would look like kids from a kindergarten comparing to robots.
Risk would come in the form of a weighted measure of replacement costs + loss of driving capabilities during the race. e.g. Probability of damage given a certain move/overtake, and if damages does occur taking into account the expected loss of driving capability and or cost.
Also interesting would be to see how AI would implicitly have to take into account game theory with many agents - e.g. If the car in front of 'me' has been highly aggressive in terms of defending against overtakes - what would 'my' best course of action be? Should I signal to him that his strategy is not a deterrence to me trying to overtake?
Racing, aside from the entertainment value it provides to onlookers, also server another important function, namely to showcase cars. I think auto makers will want to keep collisions to a minimum, lest public opinion on the traffic safety of autonomous cars is negatively impacted.
The difference between a civilian driver and a professional driver, is that a pro driver blocks out the fear. You won't go fast if you think about it. Talk to any remotely successful driver.
There's barely anyone cheering even for "Lewiz Hamiltononbot". In current F1 the pilot is merely a ballast - the result is basically predetermined by technology.
Also there's no need to use "super fast human lap" - you can compute optimal lap, it's been done. The challenge will be to design AI to beat your opponents - then it gets interesting.
People didn't stop paying attention to chess competitions when AI beat humans. We care about sports not because humans are better at things than machines - for most things they're not - but because it's humans beating other humans.
Perhaps this could end up in a place where the focus is on the cars and the technical performance, rather than human driver skill. For those of us who are more interested in engineering challenges than the celebrity driver of the day.
Current F1 is going that route where the drivers are more and more exchangeable because the tech has gotten so far and fans really don't like it and the sport is losing popularity and some would say soul.
While i would find autonomous racing exciting as well, it is not something the general public would be excited about.
I could not find a video online, but some may remember the post race press conference when Eddie Irvine (driving for Jaguar) thanked the guy at the factory that wrote the launch control software for his great start.
Oh god there's going to be so many crashes... at first. Then it will catch up to EA's racing AI and become the first casualty in the war against skynet.
If there are too many crashes it will give people a negative view of self driving cars. Perhaps Google will enter an ultra safe team that always avoids crashes but maybe never wins unless everyone else crashes out.
The spread of self driving vehicles (and even drones) is probably an 'accelerating returns' of some sort. Such context will act as a beautiful test bed for complex and limit cases. Unless the results end up locked it will backfire positively on in-society driving.
I would love to see a rule where the software that each team uses has to be open-sourced at the end of the season, both to ensure competitive parity between well funded and not-so-well-funded teams, and also to ensure that any breakthroughs spread quickly from the world of racing to the world of "normal" cars.
It would be interesting to have a stock car version with software open before the race. Teams could try exploits, interfere with GPS, drive evasively, etc. - arguably this will lead to greater hardening techniques, ability to cope with crashes of all types.
The whole FE formula is still barely doable, they change cars half way because the batteries run out, can't be charged on the go, can't have batteries swapped out. It's planned to be this way for another four years.
I imagine many other parts of the current, and of the AI formula, are equally only just possible now.
Totally different. I can care a lot about car makers competing in physical although autonomous cars with technology that will possibly make it into mine.
Watching a "simulation" that doesn't even simulate real motors? Where nothing can be fed back to car makers? No thanks.
(On the other hand and in a weird twist of irony I can enjoy cs matches and certain kinds of sports events where my home country has a fair chance of winning. :)
