Formula E and Kinetik have announced a partnership to launch a global race series for driverless electric cars. The championship will be called “ROBORACE” and will be a competitive platform for autonomous driving solutions currently in development.
Roborace will be part of the FIA Formula E Championship as a supporting event. The first Roborace will take place in the 2016-2017 season, which begins next summer, and races themselves will happen before the Formula E event and on the same circuits.
There will be ten teams with two driverless cars each to participate in the initial Roborace series. Each race will be about an hour long and all teams will race the same cars, competing not with horsepower but artificial intelligence power with the real-time computing and AI being the deciding factor in each grand prix.
Denis Sverdlov, Founder of Kinetik and ROBORACE, said: “We passionately believe that, in the future, all of the world’s vehicles will be assisted by AI and powered by electricity, thus improving the environment and road safety. ROBORACE is a celebration of revolutionary technology and innovation that humanity has achieved in that area so far. It’s a global platform to show that robotic technologies and AI can co-exist with us in real life. Thus, anyone who is at the edge of this transformation now has a platform to show the advantages of their driverless solutions and this shall push the development of the technology.”
