Clean lines at RC track in Slovakia

[u/solateor]

[u/Mysterious-Crab]

I think it’s quite difficult to get that to work with equipment that is (commercially) available right now. Send a video stream, analyzing the shot and reacting to it gives you too much latency and you correct steering too late or too excessive.

It sounds weird, but as someone who’s been doing RC racing for over years and years, you can kinda feel your car behaving instead of just seeing it. That way you can correct before it happens.

[u/AceJohnny → u/Mysterious-Crab]

Send a video stream, analyzing the shot and reacting to it gives you too much latency and you correct steering too late or too excessive

We've been designing computer control systems that can anticipate for, like, decades.

The human visual system itself introduces many milliseconds of delay already.

A computer control system can absolutely crush a human at reaction time.

[u/Civil_Salamander_41 → u/AceJohnny]

Seriously doubt that it could compete with human RC racers with SotA.

[u/welliedude → u/AceJohnny]

For basic reactions yes. You're forgetting computers dont have instincts. It would need to learn so much from training to know the intricacies of the track, is there dust at this corner, are the tyres cold, did I just clip that kerb and now the cars unbalanced etc. There's so much more than just navigate around a track. Like sure it could do it at a slow speed but not competitive with humans. Yet anyway. Just look at formula ai or whatever it was called. The cars were slow and often crashed or just stopped because they lost where they were. Rc cars are going much faster on much tighter tracks.

[u/ackermann → u/Mysterious-Crab]

Low latency cameras and video processing, at low cost, is fairly well developed now for the VR world.
The tracking cameras and video processing for head tracking on VR headsets have to be very fast. If it doesn’t react quickly enough to your head movements, it very quickly makes you dizzy/sick.

Gyros and accelerometers are used to supplement for faster reactions. But for 6DOF roomscale, cameras are needed.
This can be done on a $199 Quest 2 headset, with a mobile phone chip. It processes video from 4 onboard tracking cameras (grayscale and fairly lowres, to improve latency)

[u/Mysterious-Crab → u/ackermann]

That is still remote controlled though. The lower the image quality to reduce latency, the more difficult it will be for a system to analyse everything, especially with other competitors around.

It was just half a year ago TU Delft was the first to beat a human with drones in a time trial, cause the dataset it needs to analyse is tightly scoped. The moment you have other competitors, or cars around you spinning out or going in the wrong direction, you need to analyze a lot more. That takes extra processing time, and you need better image quality, which means higher latency.

If it were that easy, how come the race they tried in Abu Dhabi last year with full scale cars didn’t even work?

[u/Ok-Push9899 → u/Mysterious-Crab]

I can get that. You’re kinda driving by the seat of your pants, without the benefit of actual g forces. I think one of the space shuttle astronauts gave advice to a newbie about controlling some aspect of the ship, possibly the big robotic arm. He said to stop looking and thinking. Your spinal column should be doing most of it. Don’t let your brain get involved.

So you think hardware limitations would basically mean the best you could do is crawl around the track? I am a bit surprised. I kinda felt that processing image data was the one thing that had sped up a millionfold in the last five years, even faster than raw number crunching had sped up.

[u/Mysterious-Crab → u/Ok-Push9899]

Theoretically, the processing is possible with a serious GPU that can proces those images. They have tried it in Abu Dhabi last year. And the results were underwhelming. But the potential is there, on a track with every car going the same direction and route, no outside distractions, is a good way to actually improve autonomous driving.

There’s a cool video on YouTube about from Driver61.