[ExI] Team PoliMOVE Wins Indy Autonomous Challenge at CES 2023

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
...Subject: [ExI] Team PoliMOVE Wins Indy Autonomous Challenge at CES 2023

>...The team from Politechnico di Milano and the University of Alabama beat eight others, as self-driving racecars passed one another at record speeds.
By Eugene Demaitre · January 8, 2023

<https://www.robotics247.com/article/team_polimove_makes_threepeat_winning_indy_autonomous_challenge_ces_2023>

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>...Includes 1 min. video of the cars racing.

BillK

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Thanks BillK!

I haven't been following autonomous car racing, but it has gotten very exciting.  Looks to me like the sport has a lot of potential to be scaled down, since many of the size considerations in human-driven cars are limited in down scaling by the requirement to carry the prole and the requisite control linkages and safety stuff.  Take that human driver outta there and we have a whole new and interesting control engineering challenge.  Cool!

I can imagine a cool sub-challenge: require the use of an existing mass produced motorcycle engine with no turbo charging.  Reasoning: those are factory racing engines that can be bought with integrated transmissions for a few thousand bucks.  Then the challenge becomes scaling the car down to minimize weight and wind resistance.  So that focuses the task on control software rather than engine stuff that can consume a racing team's personnel and budget.  Current high performance production motorcycle engines can push a bike to close to 300 kph, so that would be all we would need.

I am imagining a setup with one of those bike engines coming in at under 400 kg.  Four sturdy fellers could hoist it into the back of a pickup truck or roll it up ramps, saving money like nobody's business.  Oh that would be a fun project to work in an engineering school.

spike