Roborace Championship News: Who Is The Man Behind The Driverless Car Competition? [VIDEO]

Apr 07, 2016 07:10 AM EDT | VDL

Driverless cars seem the latest trend in the race track today. Since the announcement of the Roborace, a motorsport championship for driverless cars on Formula E tracks, everyone has become excited about it.

The competition was first revealed in November 2015 and is supported by Denis Sverdlov, the founder of the London-based investment fund Kinetik. According to Fortune, Sverdlov believes that race cars don't need drivers. Supercomputers designed by the smartest software engineers in the world can make autonomous cars run at high speed on the race track.

Sverdlov wants the Roborace to be entertaining especially to the younger audience, the news portal adds. However, the purpose of the race is not only limited to making viewers feel good but also to deliver a clear message that driverless cars can actually be used in normal roads.

"We want to show that these cars can do crazy complicated things in an extreme environment, which would help prove that driverless cars could be very safe on normal roads. We really believe everything that is made here for this championship will go directly to regular street cars," he stated as per the publication.

Those who will be joining the competition includes famous car makers, tech companies, and racing teams. As of now, there are already 30 teams who are requesting to be included in the Roborace. Sverdlov said that he has already expected this and added that car makers which will not be engaging in driverless technology won't have a future.

Meanwhile, NVidia has already announced on its blog site that it will be the one developing the supercomputers for the driverless cars. In a blog post, the tech company revealed that its DRIVE PX 2 AI supercomputer will be used in cars.

"DRIVE PX 2 provides the processing power of 150 MacBook Pros, enough to incorporate input from a vast array of sensors - radar, lidar, cameras, GPS and high-definition mapping, for starters. And with DRIVE PX 2's deep learning capabilities - which use GPUs to help machines learn from the world around them - these racecars will get better the more they race," NVidia wrote.

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