With an incredibly bumpy Rome Formula E street circuit laid out in front of him, pro-drifter Ryan Tuerck takes the Roborace ‘DevBot’ racing car, essentially a closed cockpit prototype with an electric motor at each of the four wheels and a combined 550 horsepower, out to set a lap representative of the human ability. When he gets out of the car at the end of the lap, the engineers tell the car to execute, and it drives itself on a quick lap of the same circuit.
The goal here is to prove Roborace technology has what it takes to bring the fight directly to human drivers. They’re confident that the time the robot can produce is within a standard deviation of what Tuerck can produce. In the lead up to the race, Tuerck gets some advice from Formula E driver Lucas DiGrassi, and goes for a handful of sighting laps before setting his race lap. Based on the video, it doesn’t appear that the DevBot was given any such pro-racer advice or practice laps, it was sent out to do its lap, and it did it.
Ultimately, as you can see in the video, Tuerck does win the battle, and it is by a pretty significant margin, but the team behind the project believe that they aren’t far off from the robot being able to execute at a higher level than humans. Perhaps once the machines have gotten a little bit quicker, they could stage a tete-a-tete wheel-to-wheel battle between several DevBots and human drivers. I’d watch that.