University Racing Eindhoven (URE) claims to have made the first autonomous racing car in the Benelux. The team’s goal: “URE hopes that one day our autonomous systems will replace the human factor in traffic, making it safer than ever. As a student team and university, we want to drive innovation and push the boundaries in technology. Motor racing has always been the breeding ground for everything that drives on public roads and this will not change with autonomous driving.”
An impression by the students:
“By reaching this milestone, we have come one step closer to our goal of surpassing the best human drivers.” But it’s not that far yet, the system isn’t robust enough for that. “The next step is to further develop the autonomous systems so that they also perform better than the best drivers on the road.”
The team says that at the end of that development phase the race car can accelerate from 0-100 km/h in just 2.3 seconds.
The challenge is greater than for cars on public roads, says URE in a statement. “Racing cars have to make decisions much faster than cars on public roads, due to their extreme speeds. On public roads, human decision-making is the number one cause of accidents. It will soon be impossible to imagine a society without autonomous driving.”
Photo (c) Bart van Overbeeke
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