[ExI] Racing DIY autonomous cars

[BillK]

Hackers in West Oakland are racing DIY autonomous cars — and it may
revolutionize your ride
By Erin Baldassari | ebaldassari at bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: June 24, 2017 at 11:59 am

<http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/24/hackers-in-west-oakland-are-racing-diy-autonomous-cars-and-it-may-revolutionize-your-ride/>

Quotes:
Each month, anywhere from a few dozen to 100 people gather at a vacant
West Oakland warehouse. There’s no electricity and no flush toilets,
just a handful of folding tables and a race course hastily etched in
white and yellow paint on the concrete floor, where teams of hackers
go head-to-head in a battle to see whose car is fastest, or at least,
which one can complete the course.

These pint-sized vehicles aren’t as sophisticated as the self-driving
cars engineered by Tesla or Google but, at under $300 to make and
often assembled on site, they’re ideal for testing the technology
because they’re cheap, don’t require human safety drivers and can
crash without anybody getting hurt or killed, Anderson said.

And that ability to crash and learn from mistakes has already produced
major gains, said William Roscoe, a programmer and early participant
in the monthly meetup. It took three months before one car could
complete the track, he said, but since then, they’ve watched as the
race times have dropped by a factor of three. In just a few more
months, Roscoe’s teammate, Adam Conway, thinks the cars could approach
the speed of a vehicle with a human driver behind the wheel, and one
day, even surpass them.

For more information on the monthly meetup, visit
<https://www.meetup.com/DIYRobocars/>.

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Something for Spike to have a look at??????  :)

BillK