Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide

Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by B1FF_PSUVM on Sunday May 22, 2016 @04:21PM (#11750110)

> the little cars maximize their speed while keeping themselves stable and under control. Mostly.

You let an optimizer do its work within whatever constraints you want, it will nose out a solution. If the goal is to maximize speed without regard to fuel and rubber consumption, power slides are in the cards.

No need to "teach" or "learn". Math works.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by kctess5 on Sunday May 22, 2016 @04:58PM (#11750266)

I've worked with autonomous control for RC cars, and it's not that easy. The math is very fuzzy in highly dynamic an non-linear environments. That approach works in nice controlled environments, but will fail badly when assumptions about linearity and the effect of control decisions start to break down. Also with any open loop control model that takes dynamics into account, the state space is so large that planning at a high enough rate is a serious computational challenge. As vehicle speeds increase, the computation becomes a very hard problem.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by aab0 on Sunday May 22, 2016 @04:48PM (#11750224)

Math works - but which math? Therein is the rub.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by semi-extrinsic on Sunday May 22, 2016 @05:24PM (#11750346)

I agree, this does appear somewhat overhyped. And those powerslides are far from impressive-looking. If it was revolutionary, I think they'd have pitted this against a skilled human opponent.

But, AFAICT, the best autonomous racecars (scale or full size) are still far from beating a human.

Audi did this big thing a few months back with an autonomous RS7 versus a pro racing driver in same weight/spec RS7 [1]. The human absolutely killed the autonomous car, beat it by over nine seconds on a sub-two-minute lap at Sonoma.

If you translate that into Top Gear race track times set by the Stig, it's like the difference between a Bugatti Veyron and the fastest Mercedes E-class.

[1] http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a27200/819-roa-2015-...

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by tim333 on Sunday May 22, 2016 @06:09PM (#11750489)

>still far from beating a human

Not that far. Stanford University's Audi TTS ‘Shelley’ beats David Vodden, the racetrack CEO and amateur touring class champion at Thunderhill Raceway Park sometimes.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/driverless-car-c...

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by chongli on Sunday May 22, 2016 @05:51PM (#11750441)

But, AFAICT, the best autonomous racecars (scale or full size) are still far from beating a human.

What kind of race car are the humans driving? Does it have electronic stability control? Anti-lock breaks? Power steering? Automatic transmission? These are just a few of the many innovations that make it easier for a human to drive more easily at a high level of performance. The line between autonomous and human-operated cars is blurry.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by Bromskloss on Sunday May 22, 2016 @06:10PM (#11750499)

It's common for race cars not to have any of those.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by guscost on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:07AM (#11751803)

And if I'm not mistaken professional race drivers are faster without autonomous stability systems running, because consumer-grade traction control "plays it safe" so to speak.

Could a traction control/autonomous steering system be designed to push the envelope and risk losing traction as effectively as (or far more effectively than) a pro driver? Almost certainly, but I'm not sure how hard of a problem that will be.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by glaberficken on Monday May 23, 2016 @07:34AM (#11753161)

That's true about consumer grade stability systems which are engineered with great margins for safety.

As you can see by looking at the F1 active suspension ban in the 90s, when tuned for performance, these systems provided a real edge to even the best pro-drivers.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by semi-extrinsic on Monday May 23, 2016 @03:42PM (#11756317)

But the active suspension system etc. isn't actually in the "autonomous driving" category, it's an aerodynamics/grip improvement. What it does (maintain perfect ride height) isn't something humans do anyway.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by glaberficken on Monday May 23, 2016 @05:25PM (#11757139)

yeah good point, what about brakes and accelerators that actuate via electronics/cpu instead of mechanically like in the old days? Humans press brake/accelerate pedals...

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by semi-extrinsic on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @12:17PM (#11762813)

If you take ESP/ABS and other driver assists out of the picture, there's no real difference between drive-by-wire and hydraulic couplings (servos etc.). And if you want a fully non-servo car, it's early 1960's for you.

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by glaberficken on Monday May 23, 2016 @07:23AM (#11753114)

This is a really interesting question to think about. Remember the Active Suspension ban in F1 in the 90s? (they are debating bringing it back for the 2017 season)

A purely mechanical car (no electronics to help control any car functions at all) driven by a human most probably wont be able to match an AI controlled car (steering, accelerator, brake, gear, suspension).

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by bigiain on Sunday May 22, 2016 @09:58PM (#11751297)

Yeah, but us humans have been improving top level competition laptimes by tenths or hundredths of seconds a year at best. How quickly do you suppose the machines are going to improve over a few years or decades?

(Last night's fastest lap in the MotoGP race at Mugello was 5 hundredths slower than the class lap record set back in 2013. Admittedly there've been rule changes, but the humans aren't getting much faster.))

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Re:Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide by mac01021 on Monday May 23, 2016 @07:14AM (#11753086)

Given a particular car/bike with a particular set of tires on a particular track, Newton’s laws impose a theoretical limit on lap time.

I don't know how close to that limit the best humans have come, but it wouldn't surprise me too much to find that it's within a second or two.

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