Roborace heads back to Goodwood with new DevBot 2.0 autonomous race car
This one has space for a human inside, since the series has changed its scope.
Last year, Roborace's self-driving Robocar became the first autonomous vehicle to make its way up Lord March's driveway at the Goodwood Festival of Speed hillclimb. While many things have changed between now and then, Roborace is still moving forward and will bring an entirely new race car to Goodwood this year for yet another blast up the hill.
Roborace announced on Monday that it will return to the 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. Instead of rehashing last year's run, the first AV-specific racing series will instead bring its latest car, DevBot 2.0. It will make one run each day between July 4 and 7.
Unlike the previous car, DevBot 2.0 has space for a human driver alongside all the hardware and software needed to run autonomously. This is because Roborace has changed its scope a bit; instead of being a series with driverless cars, it now envisions a racing series where humans and robots work in tandem in some way. DevBot 2.0 is being used in Roborace's "Alpha" season, which has taken racers to Spain and Italy already.
Robocar didn't have too bad of a time working its way up the hill, although it didn't use every last inch of its four 181-horsepower electric motors. Goodwood's hill provided some interesting lessons for Roborace, because the narrow track and tree cover weren't the best for the car's GPS signals, so it needed to employ every tool in its bag to complete the run.
