This weekend, the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Chichester, UK, is hosting its annual hill climb, where sporty cars old and new zip around the Duke of Richmond's estate. This year, an autonomous race car is driving itself around the 1.16 mile track, while visitors to Goodwood also get to sit in the virtual passenger seat for an immersive ride along. Now you can see exactly what that's like in a 360° video released by Roborace.
Roborace has been testing the Robocar in the run up to opening day at Goodwood, making sure everything works as it should and there are no surprises when it whizzes around the track under the ever-watchful gaze of the public. It recently completed a full hill climb ahead of its official run, and to celebrate the achievement, a video camera went along for the ride.
You can see the immersive 360° footage below (or hop on over to YouTube for the opportunity to view at glorious 5,120 x 2,880 resolution).
The 1,350 kg (2,976 lb) Robocar has four 135 kW electric motors for over 500 horsepower combined, and feeds data from radar, LiDAR, ultrasonic sensors, GPS and cameras to an onboard computer system powered by Nvidia Drive technology.
The Robocar made its first official hill climb run at Goodwood earlier today in front of around 55,000 Festival visitors, which you can see in the video below. "We are ecstatic that the team have been able to achieve this landmark run and we hope that it draws attention to the amazing advances that are being made in the automotive industry," said Roborace's Rod Chong.
Visitors to Goodwood this weekend can catch the Robocar tackling the hill climb again on Saturday at 10:50 am (BST) and Sunday at 11:25 am. Each run will also be livestreamed on the Roborace Facebook page.
Source: Roborace
Seems to me that the system is braking too soon and smoothly at every turn rather than waiting until a later moment to brake hard, hit the apex of the curve and then punch it. So would a firmware upgrade help with that?