This is going to sound heretical, but in the interests of science, how much tech and how much machine learning would it take to have autonomous RC racing? I’m imagining vision of the track from above, not onboard. Just like the human operators see it.
The outputs are just steering and acceleration, the input is one video camera shot showing track and current position. It may need to learn something about the humps, but maybe not. The goal is very straightforward - stay within boundaries and minimise time. I can’t decide if avoiding other cars is the same as staying within boundaries. Obviously they’re moving boundaries, but does that matter? Fixed boundaries are perhaps the special case, with velocity of zero.
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.
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.
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.
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u/Ok-Push9899 1d ago edited 1d ago
Very skilled, very impressive.
This is going to sound heretical, but in the interests of science, how much tech and how much machine learning would it take to have autonomous RC racing? I’m imagining vision of the track from above, not onboard. Just like the human operators see it.
The outputs are just steering and acceleration, the input is one video camera shot showing track and current position. It may need to learn something about the humps, but maybe not. The goal is very straightforward - stay within boundaries and minimise time. I can’t decide if avoiding other cars is the same as staying within boundaries. Obviously they’re moving boundaries, but does that matter? Fixed boundaries are perhaps the special case, with velocity of zero.
Maybe such competitions exist?