Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Roborace unleashes ‘DevBot,’ a prototype autonomous race car

By

Roborace is moving closer to the goal of autonomous race cars with the release of its first development vehicle.

Known as the “DevBot,” the car doesn’t look anything like renderings released by Roborace earlier this year, but it does pack the hardware and software the nascent race series plans to use on its actual cars. The final designs for those cars will be unveiled later this year, series organizers say.

Recommended Videos

Read more: Roborace will use Nvidia’s Drive PX 2

Related

Unlike the final product, the DevBot has space for a human driver. Roborace says this is to allow teams to “fully understand how the car thinks and feels on a racetrack alongside the comprehensive real-time data.” It’s probably a good idea to have a human onboard anyway, in case the DevBot decides to go all Skynet on innocent bystanders.

Roborace says it has been testing the fully custom development vehicle for about nine months on airfields and racetracks, including the famous Silverstone circuit in England, home of the Formula One British Grand Prix. Teams will be able to use the car to experiment with different setups before entering a pre-qualifying process for the series, which begins next month.

Roborace is an offshoot of Formula E, which features electric cars driven the old fashioned way, by humans. The plan is for Roborace events to run in tandem with Formula E, serving as a sort of warmup to the main Formula E races. The use of “support series” like this isn’t uncommon in other forms of racing, but Roborace will be the first to use self-driving cars.

The DevBot will be shown to the public for the first time August 24 during the Formula E open practice sessions at the Donington, England circuit. The first Roboraces will take place during the upcoming Formula E season, which kicks off in Hong Kong October 9.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Stephen Edelstein
Stephen Edelstein
Contributing Editor
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Watch folks react to their first ride in GM Cruise’s driverless car
Two people taking their first ride in an autonomous car.

General Motors autonomous car unit, Cruise, has started to offer driverless rides to residents of San Francisco as it moves toward the launch of a full-fledged robo-taxi service.

Following a test run of the service last week, Cruise has released a video (below) showing the reaction of the very first passengers as they rode through the streets of the Californian city in a vehicle that had nobody behind the wheel.

Read more
We now know what the self-driving Apple Car might look like
A render that shows what the Apple Car might look like.

Thanks to several 3D concept renders, we now know what the future self-driving Apple Car might look like.

Vanarama, a British car-leasing company, took inspiration from other Apple products, as well as Apple patents, in order to accurately picture the rumored Apple car.

Read more