What if an autonomous vehicle can drive a race car faster than a human around a track?This is the query that the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racas League (A2RL) is looking to answer. The series experienced an aborted run in its inaugural run last year, but continues to expand its generation into a more in-depth festival in 2025. I spoke with Stephane Timpano, CEO of Aspire, who created A2RL, about what has gone wrong and what came before and what came before and what happened and what happened and what the future of the incumbent.
“We had the first race in April 2024,” says Timpano. This was only a year after the decision had been made to create A2RL, which is phenomenal considering the technological challenges involved. “The race didn’t go as planned. But this was an R&D challenge. We knew that some things would go well and others not so well. We also took a lot of risks, because there are other organizations working on autonomous racing.” Aspire is part of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the country’s innovation agency. Aspire has a wide portfolio of futuristic projects, which includes grand challenges if which A2DL is the most audacious so far.
“No one else has pushed the limit of putting multiple cars on an F1 circuit at the same time,” says Timpano. “We knew that by doing this, we put the cars and the teams at risk of an incident. But what we learn from this kind of incident is very helpful, because it helps us to understand how to avoid incidents in the future.” A2RL has put this learning towards future races. “The eight teams we had last year are already confirmed for this year, and we have four additional teams joining, which is expanding our global coverage. This includes teams from the US, Europe, Asia and Japan. They are covering the entire planet today but also not only the R&D world, which is the origin of all these things, but industry as well. Some of these teams are in racing. Some are in autonomy, and they want to understand how this works in complex environments like Super Formula or Formula One.”
One of the A2RL teams comes from the Autonomous Lab at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, led by Dr Majid Khonji. “The A2RL 2024 race had three parts: timed laps, attack and defend, and multiple vehicle challenge,” says Dr Khonji. “With timed laps, you need to complete a lap as fast as possible. Attack and defend is between two cars, which overtake and defend their position. The multiple vehicle challenge extends that to more cars. This was our first time participating, and it was surprising how technologies fail at high speed. Things that work at low speed, fall apart when pushed.”
“We crush our cars, really twice due to location errors, however, we control to succeed at a speed of 173 kilometers consistent with the time, which is respectable,” explains Dr. Khonji. “Our tour time was a decent, if not exceptional, two minutes 50 seconds. ” A2RL uses a car that demanding formula with formula with 550 HP formula compared to 1,000 HP of Formula 1, so that the times in the turn will be consistent even with a human conductor. The last Formula E 469 HP car. The autonomous formula of the University of Khalifa is also a software completed outside the gates of the race. “Our object tracker is classified number one in Waymo and Kitti knowledge sets,” said Dr. Khonji. “These are reference points that compare algorithms in the stick with the formula. ” However, A2RL is more a matter of immediate decisions than the complicated autonomy required through urban autocorption. “In the race, we review especially to follow a path. We design the offline. Ai is blind. We do not use any control theory of fantasy AI. We will also have to build the device so that if it fails, it can recover. This is a domain that these races literally improve. Since you literally have to be very immediate and react quickly, you have less time for calculation, so the maximum groups do not use fantasy concepts in a race. The calculation will have to be in the car. »
Khalifa University will continue to compete as A2RL develops. “Since last year, we are now making plans for a multi-year commitment to several careers,” Timpano explains. “We went to Japan a few weeks ago to Suzuka for a demonstration. A car ended up in the wall, which happens in those situations. We have a new race in April 2025, which will be like the one we did last year but with 4 additional teams. This time, we’re going to have more than one show. We will bring more human aspects. Last year, we had Daniel Kvyat, a human pilot who flows in opposition to a self-driving car. At the time, we had a little less than 10 seconds of difference between the two cars, which are incredible. »»
Timpano thinks autonomous cars can do better, however. “We’re trying to reduce the distance between human and machine, and we’re going to have multiple cars doing that at the same time,” he says. “We’re adding complexity. We’re trying to push the R&D envelope on finding new ways of doing autonomous driving in a more efficient and precise way, at higher speed in more complex environments. The second element is building up trust. This is the most important word here for the public. We need people to start being convinced that autonomous solutions bring a big value to the mobility of tomorrow. This is going to change the cities as we know them today, because they are not sustainable anymore. Too many people are concentrated into small areas. You need to have people be confident to put themselves on an autonomous bus, and to put their kids in an autonomous car or taxi. If they see Super Formula cars at 250 kilometers per hour doing well, then you start building up trust.”
A2RL will expand its global reach by 2025.
“Adding the human versus the AI is where the interest sits for most people, seeing former Formula One racing champions pitted against the machine,” says Timpano. This harks back to former Grand Challenges, such as when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess, IBM’s Watson won the Jeopardy gameshow, and DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated the world’s number one Go player. “Daniel Kvyat had the courage to race against a machine where you cannot control its performance. A lot of drivers have declined to do this because they don’t feel comfortable having a machine racing a few meters behind them.”
A2RL is also contemplating systems to augment rather than upgrade pilots. “We can also have race cars with champion drivers helped through generation to conform training,” Timpano says. “We would all like to see drivers racing at 400 kilometres consistent with the hour, however, today we can’t, because drivers can’t do that in cars.
Individual grills are not the only cars in which A2RL works. “The League has with cars, because that is what other people like, and it is visible,” says Tipano. “But” but “but” but we also organize the same type of festival with drones. We have an association with Drone Champions League, which is one of the main drones pilot leagues. With them, we have evolved a drone in which we have put autonomous kitsarray, we invite the groups to participate. A Super Formula of Automobiles of Automobiles $ 100,000 each, but an autonomous drone prices of a few thousand dollars, so it is less difficult to access. We had 8 groups in the first car race. We have 135 groups that seek to be determined for drone race and 35 of them have already made the qualifications. We will have secondary qualifications in January and April. We will have the first race with the most productive groups, where we have, at this stage, study racing groups and groups together. They will run in Abu Dhabi.
A2RL is now expanding into drone racing.
Even though the first A2RL race was a diverse experience, Timpano envisions an exciting long race for autonomous racing. “In ten years, we might not be surprised if there’s a league with self-driving cars and human cars, and maybe even in the same team,” he says. A lot of wanting to take place between now and then, with technology, protection, protection and performance, but we on travel. “
A community. Many voices. Create a slack count to keep your thoughts down.
Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.
To do this, follow the publication regulations the situations of use of our site. We have summarized some of those key regulations below. In other words, keep it civil.
Your message will be rejected if we realize that it turns out to contain:
User accounts will be blocked if we become aware or that users are compromised:
So how can you be a difficult user?
Thanks for reading the guidelines of our community. Read the complete list of publication regulations discovered in the terms of use of our site.