I am unashamedly fascinated by the concept of Roborace. This new international series proposes to remove the human from the loop and have purely autonomous racing. I have already explored the huge implications of the concept of autonomous motor racing in the feature article on this site ‘Summoning the demon’ but with more details emerging about the new Roborace car I thought I would look at that machine specifically.

The car itself is a striking looking thing, not surprising considering that it is the work of Dan Simon, the man behind the wonderful Cosmic Racers books. But I must say I am rather disappointed by the fact that the series will use a one make car, this prevents engineers and car designers from really pushing the limits of what can be done without having to worry about accommodating the driver and keeping them safe. But I assume this has been done initially to prevent exactly that from happening.

The constructor of the car has yet to be announced though I don’t think the odds on Dallara being the chosen supplier are very long. However the dimensions of the car have been announced, that the car is 4,800mm long and has a 2,000mm track with a wheelbase of 2,800 metres. It will weigh in at 1,000kg. Peak speeds according to sources at Roborace will be around 186mph.

It is interesting as this car is expected to race on the same circuits as Formula E, the quoted performance of the still to be named Robocar is notably higher than that of the Dallara built Spark 01E (which makes up 100% of the FE grid). A heavier car travelling at higher speeds seems to me to be something which could be of concern in terms of spectator safety. Actually I don’t know why the car is so big and heavy, without the need to accommodate the driver one would expect it to be smaller and lighter. The onboard brain of the Roborace car is said to be small enough to fit inside a lunchbox (at which point one engineer quipped to me that this is still significantly larger than most racing drivers grey matter). Nobody said what sized lunchbox it was. I had a standard UK sized plastic Thomas the Tank Engine one if you must know. One suspects the average North American lunchbox is larger.

The design of the car seems much lower drag than that of the Spark but also seems to feature a lot less cooling. That said Dan Simon is a concept artist and not an automotive engineer so it remains to be seen if the concept carries through to production unaltered. Little is known about what lies under the skin of the car, the external renderings make it clear that push rod actuated suspension features all round, but the spring and damper layout and supplier(s?) are not yet determined. The rear floor of the car seems to be very small but if all cars are the same what does it matter, indeed it will be fun to see if the computers can handle oversteer and tricky slip angles.

Despite one website claiming to reveal ‘motor’ details the power unit of the Roborace car has yet to be announced but the shape of the car and the weight of it suggest that it is an EV, and one suspects using a number of common parts with Formula E, after all there are a number of those McLaren E-motors sitting unused at the moment.

What we do know is that every single car on the grid will be identical in every way bar the paint job. When Roborace was first announced I thought that it was set to be a battle of engineering and technology which had huge relevance for the automotive world. I can understand the chassis and power unit being the same in this series (understand not agree with) as the focus is on the autonomous technology. But I found the announcement of a single specification processor and sensor package more than surprising, it was disappointing.



Every car in Roborace will think with the same brain, a NVIDIA Drive PX2. This is a powerful and small (depending on definition of lunchbox) computer with some serious horsepower. “Its two next-generation Tegra®processors plus two next-generation discrete GPUs, based on the Pascal™ architecture,deliver up to 24 trillion deep learning operations per second, which are specialized instructions that accelerate the maths used in deep learning network inference. That’s over 10 times more computational horsepower than the previous-generation product.” Says the press release.

It is clearly a potent bit of kit which its makers claim is a bit like a Cylon raider and learns the more it is run. “NVIDIA’s GPU is central to advances in deep learning and supercomputing” claimed the man who created it. “We are leveraging these to create the brain of future autonomous vehicles that will be continuously alert, and eventually achieve superhuman levels of situational awareness. Autonomous cars will bring increased safety, new convenient mobility services and even beautiful urban designs- providing a powerful force for a better future.”

But the fact that every car will run identical hardware boils the championship down to a simple battle of the algorithms. The cars will think with the same brain, see with the same eyes (sensors) and run in the same environment. Roborace is at its very core a battle fought long before the cars get to the track, it is a battle of software, a battle fought with lines of code as weapons. What Roborace has done by making every single physical thing identical is reduce the cars to a gimmick in what is simply a battle of coders, it has become something more suited to the pages of Slashdot (/.) than those of Racecar Engineering. If the battle is purely one of software then why even bother with the hardware at all – plug the software into a simulation package and it will give you the result.

The entertainment value of the series is also under threat from this too, what makes one make series like GP2 even vaguely exciting is the flawed component, the human in the loop. Drivers have bad days and good days, I know one driver who always did well in a race if he had done well with the local women the night before, I know another where the opposite applies. I know others who are fantastic in the wet as well as those who slink into the pits at the first droplets. It is the unpredictable elements that make it a race, the differences. Sure at first someone will do a better code than another, one will be better at lap time and one better at managing the tyres and battery(?) over the one hour races, another may be better at overtaking, but they will all improve over the first few races until it all becomes a procession. Then the organisers will have to throw in artificial variances, fast degrading tyres for example (sound familiar?) or the coders will have to create more aggressive car to car strategies. The cars may end up learning the techniques of Wimbledon banger racing (soon to be no more in an unrelated disaster for the sport).



The concept of this series in many ways strips motor racing back to its core, a proving ground for new technologies, but by limiting the sensors and computer hardware it drastically limits that in the same way that Formula E restricts battery technology. By appointing the doubtless highly capable NVIDIA as sole supplier a number of other highly capable suppliers are ruled out, Freescale for example which has a proven track record in motor racing supplying the brains of every F1 car and every NASCAR engine for some years now. In wider terms we could have had a battle of Lenovo, Dell and Apple (the latter of these would look very stylish break down halfway through the race and then blame the track).

Roborace needs technical variance more than any other series as it is entirely decided by the technology. It needs freedom in terms of sensors, processors, operating systems and of course software, in time it should also have total technical freedom too, organisations like Google, Audi or whoever should build the fastest autonomous car possible with the limitations of the circuit. I don’t think that the cars they would build would look anything like the Dan Simon design we see here.

I will go to the first Roborace er race and I hope to be pleasantly surprised, my mind remains far more open than the rulebook for now.

