Driverless racing car takes to the streets of Paris

The vehicle completed a lap of the Paris ePrix circuit ahead of the city’s 2017 Formula E race, which took place on 2Oth May.

The demonstration saw the car - which is designed to be capable of speeds of upto 200mph - negotiate its way at low speed around 14 turns of the 1.9km circuit without a human in the vehicle entirely self-driven by autonomous software.

Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov hailed the demonstration as a major milestone in the development of autonomous racing: “Roborace is the only company in the world right now testing driverless technologies on city streets without a human in the car – this is something truly unique.”

Designed by Daniel Simon, who has created vehicles for Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters including Tron Legacy and Oblivion, the vehicles weighs 1000kg , is driven by four 300kW motors, and powered by a 540kW battery. It uses a number of technologies to ‘drive’ itself including 5 lidars, 2 radars, 18 ultrasonic sensors, 2 optical speed sensors, 6 AI cameras, GNSS positioning and is powered by Nvidia’s Drive PX2 brain, capable of up to 24 trillion A.I. operations per second to be programmed by teams’ software engineers using complex algorithms.