Can racing put driverless technology on fast track?

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Gentlemen, start your algorithms.

With the rise of digital e-sports, elite video gamers draw millions of viewers to online broadcasts and armchair pilots race drones through obstacle courses. Now there is a movement to turn driverless car racing into the next big thing.

Kinetik, a London investment fund led by Russian entrepreneur Denis Sverdlov, grabbed attention for that idea this month by releasing a rendering of a lime-green prototype resembling a Formula One car, but without room for a driver.

Sverdlov, who intends to stage a racing series called Roborace alongside the Formula E electric-drive racing series, envisions cars battling for pole position at the indecent speed of 180 mph, like life-size slot cars. Freed from having to protect a human behind the wheel, teams could tinker with software and crash with impunity, pushing the limits of technology and speeding the arrival of self-driving cars.

"Our heroes are not drivers," Sverdlov told the audience this month at a conference held by chipmaker Nvidia Corp., which has agreed to supply high-powered computers to participating teams. "Our heroes are engineers."

Sverdlov, former CEO of Moscow-based telecom company Yota, is best known for the YotaPhone, a quirky double-screened smartphone with a color display on the front and a low-energy e-ink display on the back.

To design the Roborace prototype, he hired Daniel Simon, a former Volkswagen stylist who designed the dueling "light cycles" from Disney's 2010 reboot of the classic science-fiction film Tron.

Some autonomous driving experts are skeptical of Sverdlov's plan to stage the first Roborace contests during the 2016-17 Formula E season, as he has yet to explain where Kinetik will get its cars or how it will achieve its target speeds.

Human drivers can see about 300 meters down a track. Even the costly lidar scanners that Google uses for its experimental self-driving cars struggle around 200 meters, making Formula One speeds difficult to achieve, said Josh Hartung, CEO of Harbrick, an Oregon-based startup developing software for autonomous cars.

"There's some skepticism for sure, and it's warranted," Hartung said. "Some of [Roborace's] goals, especially in terms of speed, far outpace the capabilities of today's sensing. But that's the great thing about racing, right? It pushes limits." 

Sverdlov has said each team competing in Roborace would use a race car stocked with identical hardware, including cameras, ultrasound, lidar sensors and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. To build fields of entrants for physical races around Formula E courses, Roborace would run simulations to determine which teams' software algorithms would allow their cars to get around the track fastest. 

"When spectators see how those robots behave in extreme conditions," Sverdlov said, "it will be easier to accept them on public roads as well." 

Motorsports have always straddled a fine line between business and pleasure. Even as automakers and suppliers have tinkered on the racetrack to refine technology for production cars, racing series such as Formula One and NASCAR have grown into some of the most lucrative entertainment empires in the world. 

Some automakers see driverless racing as the next r&d frontier. Audi has been refining autonomous race cars since 2010, when it announced that its test car, a TTS coupe, had completed the Pikes Peak hill climb in 27 minutes. 

Yet the idea of Roborace has left some engineers feeling uneasy. To those who see automated driving as a way to make the roads safer, driverless racing crashes could leave the public less comfortable with the technology. 

"To make people appreciate self-driving cars and trust them, we need to show that they're as good as the best racing drivers," said Vincent Laurense, a doctoral student at Stanford University who is using a driverless race car nicknamed Shelley for his research on the limits of grip. "If it's a demonstration of great control, [racing] could be a good thing. If it's like bumper cars, I could see it being a negative."

Even as Roborace works to build driverless racing into a form of entertainment, Silicon Valley's grass-roots racers are planning an event next month at Thunderhill Raceway Park north of Sacramento called "The First Autonomous Track Day." 

It was organized by entrepreneur Joshua Schachter, an avid racing fan who once sold a Web browsing startup to Yahoo. George Hotz, a San Francisco hacker who trained an Acura to drive itself down the freeway, plans to participate in the track day through his new company, Comma.ai. Campbell, Calif.-based Renovo Motors, which helped Stanford students rebuild a DeLorean DMC-12 into an electric, autonomous drifting car, will also send a car onto the track. 

Harbrick's Hartung, who also plans to attend, said it would feel like cheating to him to outfit autonomous race cars with expensive technology, such as high-precision GPS, that would be impractical for commercial use. Yet he acknowledged that it could push the limits of hardware and software, just as racing delivered breakthrough engine technology by using high-octane fuel unavailable to ordinary drivers. 

"I think there's room for both approaches," Hartung said, adding, "The more focus on robotic cars in race environments, the better."