Freight Dog:
muckles:
Like I said strange logic, but he might be right, I know a lot of drivers love historic racing and it just being them and the car.
He wasn’t a bad driver, took the 2007 GP2 Championship to the last race with our driver, our guy won, mainly because of a good pit stop call to go from wets to slicks. We also did a bit of testing with him and he seemed like a nice bloke.
I think Guy Martin’s take will be interesting and most of his stuff is worth watching.
I’ve just had a light read about the roborace. Certainly is interesting. I see he wants to create a platform to furnish manufacturers with a showcase for advances.
Just curious why his concept is a strange logic? I suspect he could if anything be a little cart before the horse. A timing issue. As a showcase to a new technology it could be argued there is a dichotomy; to make interesting viewing it would need to have an element of something, the whole concept is trying to assuage. A bit of risk. The first few autonomous crashes on the track won’t do much to pacify a public sitting on the fence. But I think that’ll be short term. The consumer conditioning machine will gather pace and the human trait of peer pressure will do the rest. When they first opened a railway tunnel it was believed you had to hold your breath.
Maybe a bit unfair to say strange logic, but I think if manufacturers pour millions into motorsport they’ll want to showcase their latest developments, which is why so many have dropped race series and gone to formula E.
Not really sure how Roborace is going to develop, I think the idea is you pit engineering teams against each other to try and win, that pushes the technology to the edge and probably over it at times. Maybe they hope people will be much more supportive of the team, a bit like some people support Ferrari regardless of the driver or the Australian fans rivalry between Holden and Ford.
Then you have Di Grassi’s idea races being totally down to driver ability, not sure how well that well work, even with the stuff I’ve done, so much comes down engineers looking at banks of monitors in the garage and working out strategies as things develop during the race. Far more of a team sport than you’d think, even in my humble role of getting the right tyres ready at the right time.
Freight Dog:
My personal reservations on the trajectory of autonomy remain. I believe this healthy. Only a fool doesn’t do due diligence for themselves on concepts or question.
I think it’s healthy too, the worst thing for those who are pushing for autonomous cars would be too launch them on the road too early, a few problems could set back acceptance for years.
Like I said the Roborace concept has only taken about 2 years to get to this stage, but it will be operating in a controlled environment, fully autonomous (level 5) cars have to operate in all environments and has to be as perfect as possible immediately. We will see increasing autonomy, we’ve seen some already, such as emergency braking, ACC, and some self driving functions.
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I kind of read you’re involved with motorsport. Did you work with Guy on some of that testing?
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No I haven’t been involved with this and I’ve never met Guy Martin, but I have worked with a few of the people on this and similar projects, my work for the last couple of years has been away from working directly for teams and more with companies working on automotive development, I’ve found the engineers very approachable and will always take time to explain things, even if I don’t understand much of it.
Freight Dog:
The article I read on roborace, mentioned the use of LIDAR. We used to have LIDAR on some of the stuff I did years ago. Blast from the past reading that. Forgot about lidar.
I think LIDAR is giving the autonomous industry one of it’s development problems, everything I’ve read says it doesn’t work so well in snow and heavy rain. Ford has announced it has a car that will work on snow covered roads, by working out where the road goes from 3d maps and information such as road signs, but this is only once the snow has stopped falling.
What did the aviation industry use it for and what has replaced it?