Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

The Drone Racing League’s newest racing rig is piloted entirely by A.I.

By
Introducing RacerAI

Professional drone racing circuit the Drone Racing League (DRL), has unleashed its first autonomous racing drone. Called RacerAI, the innovative new drone changes the drone racing game by flying itself, rather than requiring a human to steer it. Resembling a stealth aircraft with its angular, arrow-shaped body, RacerAI is built for speed — and possibly for joining Jeopardy, chess, Go, and myriad other games that machines can whoop us puny humans at.

Recommended Videos

The sleek RacerAI drone is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier compute platform, is capable of generating 20 pounds of thrusts, and boasts four onboard stereoscopic cameras. These give it the ability to detect and identify objects with twice the field of view as human pilots.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“The DRL RacerAI is a major milestone for The Drone Racing League and the future of sports,” DRL CEO and founder Nicholas Horbaczewsk said in a statement. “A.I. has defeated humans in nearly every digital game we know, but it hasn’t come close to defeating a human in real-life sports — yet.”

Related

The DRL RacerAI debuts today as the Drone Racing League kicks off its first Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit at Addition Financial Arena in Orlando. The four-race course will pit nine physically identical DRL RacerAI drones against each other. What separates the drones are the artificial intelligence algorithms that control each one. These were developed by separate teams of (human) programmers as part of the Lockheed Martin AlphaPilot Challenge. The autonomous drone which racks up the fastest time — achieved without the benefit of GPS, data relay or human intervention — will then go head-to-head against the fastest 2019 DRL Allianz World Champion pilot with the goal of winning. This is the racing league’s main championship contest.

While drone racing is still a relatively niche sport, this is nonetheless exciting work. Better autonomous drones will help make things like drone deliveries and other similarly helpful applications more compelling. Ultimately, this is going to be a win for humanity. Even if having yet another reminder that A.I. can kick our butts at seemingly every leisure activity doesn’t necessarily sound like it on the surface!

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
How the USPS uses Nvidia GPUs and A.I. to track missing mail
A United States Postal Service USPS truck driving on a tree-lined street.

The United States Postal Service, or USPS, is relying on artificial intelligence-powered by Nvidia's EGX systems to track more than 100 million pieces of mail a day that goes through its network. The world's busiest postal service system is relying on GPU-accelerated A.I. systems to help solve the challenges of locating lost or missing packages and mail. Essentially, the USPS turned to A.I. to help it locate a "needle in a haystack."

To solve that challenge, USPS engineers created an edge A.I. system of servers that can scan and locate mail. They created algorithms for the system that were trained on 13 Nvidia DGX systems located at USPS data centers. Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, for reference, pack in five petaflops of compute power and cost just under $200,000. It is based on the same Ampere architecture found on Nvidia's consumer GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs.

Read more
Algorithmic architecture: Should we let A.I. design buildings for us?
Generated Venice cities

Designs iterate over time. Architecture designed and built in 1921 won’t look the same as a building from 1971 or from 2021. Trends change, materials evolve, and issues like sustainability gain importance, among other factors. But what if this evolution wasn’t just about the types of buildings architects design, but was, in fact, key to how they design? That’s the promise of evolutionary algorithms as a design tool.

While designers have long since used tools like Computer Aided Design (CAD) to help conceptualize projects, proponents of generative design want to go several steps further. They want to use algorithms that mimic evolutionary processes inside a computer to help design buildings from the ground up. And, at least when it comes to houses, the results are pretty darn interesting.
Generative design
Celestino Soddu has been working with evolutionary algorithms for longer than most people working today have been using computers. A contemporary Italian architect and designer now in his mid-70s, Soddu became interested in the technology’s potential impact on design back in the days of the Apple II. What interested him was the potential for endlessly riffing on a theme. Or as Soddu, who is also professor of generative design at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, told Digital Trends, he liked the idea of “opening the door to endless variation.”

Read more
Emotion-sensing A.I. is here, and it could be in your next job interview
man speaking into phone

I vividly remember witnessing speech recognition technology in action for the first time. It was in the mid-1990s on a Macintosh computer in my grade school classroom. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -- and this was magical all right, seeing spoken words appearing on the screen without anyone having to physically hammer them out on a keyboard.

Jump forward another couple of decades, and now a large (and rapidly growing) number of our devices feature A.I. assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. These tools, built using the latest artificial intelligence technology, aren’t simply able to transcribe words -- they are able to make sense of their contents to carry out actions.

Read more