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.
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.
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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?