Autonomous Racecar Roborace Will Use Nvidia Drive PX 2 System

The electric racing cars that will participate in the Roborace will be equipped with Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 system. With the hardware, the race cars have to compete autonomously on the race track for a podium spot. Speeds would be up to 300 km/h.

Nvidia announced at the GPU Technology Conference that it will supply its Drive PX 2 autonomous driving system to the Roborace. That championship was already announced last year by the organizers of Formula E.

The futuristic-looking cars that participate in the Roborace are made by Kinetik and are not equipped with a seat. After all, there is no driver in the car; it is a championship for autonomous racing cars.

The races should take place prior to the Formula E Championship races. That should still happen during the 2016/2017 season, but it is unknown when the first Roborace will be held.

Nvidia has been working on the Drive PX system for a long time, which should let cars perform tasks on their own. For the current version, the company uses a Tegra X1 soc with Maxwell GPU, but the Drive PX 2 system gets newer hardware with a GPU based on the Pascal architecture. At the CES fair in January, Nvidia already announced the water-cooled box.

Nvidia Drive PX 2 hardware