- The world's largest autonomous race took place in Abu Dhabi this weekend.
- The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League final featured six fully autonomous cars.
- The event also featured a showdown between an AI car and a human driver.
What was billed as the world's largest autonomous car race took place in Abu Dhabi this weekend with the final round of the second season of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), held at the Yas Marina Circuit.
A2RL is organised by Aspire, which is part of the UAE government's Advanced Technology Research Council, and has three distinct categories: Car Race, Drone Race and Buggy Race.
The Car Race is a standard formula racing format featuring self-driving versions of modified Dallara SF23 Super Formula cars that use a Honda-based 2.0-litre turbo four-cylinder engine and a six-speed transmission, with advanced sensor systems, including lidar, radar and cameras, and hydraulic actuators for AI control.
Other series run by A2RL include the Drone Race - a quadcopter drone racing format - and the Buggy Race - an off-road racing format using self-driving dune buggies.
The A2RL Season 2 event has been 18 months in the making, culminating in the qualification for the final of six teams out of the 11 from across the globe. The teams were competing for a total prize pool of US$2.25 million, and ticket allocation for the main grandstand at the circuit reportedly reached full capacity before the event.
The Grand Final was a 20-lap, multi-car race contested by the six teams, which included reigning champions TUM, as well as Unimore, Kinetiz, TII Racing, PoliMOVE, and Constructor.
TUM started the race on pole position, but Unimore, which had shown increasing speed in practice, overtook early in the race, leading the race at speeds exceeding 200km/h until a key incident occurred when back marker Constructor came to a halt mid-corner.
The lead Unimore car attempted to avoid the Constructor car, but clipped it resulting in front-end damage that forced it to retire from the race. Following a full course yellow flag, the race resumed and TUM subsequently maintained the lead, with four cars eventually crossing the line, despite a further incident later in the race when the Kinetiz car had a spin.
The event also featured the A2RL Human vs AI where TUM raced against former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat. The AI racer was given a ten-second head start for the 10-lap chase on the North layout of the circuit, but Kvyat closed the gap significantly during the opening laps, eventually taking the lead.
The aim of the 'race' wasn't actually to see who would win, but rather showcase how far AI racing technology had come in the past 18 months - the AI car crossed the line just 1.6 seconds after Kvyat, compared to the more that 10 second gap at the inaugural event, with the Russian driver noting that the gap had been reduced dramatically from a gap of "minutes" when development first began.
