During the Roborace Season Beta event being streamed on Twitch, which pits multiple teams operating “self-driving” cars against each other in an augmented reality experience, one of the cars crashed in an unfortunate, but ultimately hilarious, fashion.
If you never heard of Roborace, you’re probably not the only one. The AI-focused racing experience has only been around for a few years now and while it’s certainly entertaining, it hasn’t quite hit the mainstream just yet in the same way that something like Formula 1 racing has.
Despite this, Season Beta of the aforementioned competition is currently underway and is being streamed on Twitch for the world to see. Of course, it wouldn’t be a race without some spectacular crashes and one happened in an absolutely hilarious fashion on October 29.
Roborace is the world first driver-less/autonomous motorsports category.
This is one of their first live-broadcasted events.
This was the second run.
It drove straight into a wall. pic.twitter.com/ss5R2YVRi3
— Ryan (@dogryan100) October 29, 2020
During the second day of the Season Beta race, Acronis SIT Autonomous’s DevBot 2.0 car took an abrupt sharp turn directly into a wall immediately after being at a standstill, leading to an unfortunate, albeit hilarious moment during the race.
Unfortunately, the camera cuts away before we can see the reaction of the operators, although it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t be a little annoyed at that immediate outcome. While it’s currently unknown what the estimated price is for the DevBot 2.0, as they’re all produced specifically by Roborace, this little crash probably just cost the team a lot of money.
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WHATTT 😭 It's live https://t.co/LOFjjjXKkL pic.twitter.com/Jz5mxclmH5
— Roborace (@roborace) October 29, 2020
The DevBot 2.0 uses Nvidia’s DRIVE platform to operate, which allows artificial intelligence to take over driving the fully electric car, as it races through an augmented reality track.
As the name suggests, this is the second iteration to use the name and is being used by all teams during Season Beta. It’s unknown whether this error was due to a technical error or was down to the “operators”.
If fans are interested in Roborace, Season Beta is set to continue until October 30, and will be streamed on the competition’s official Twitch channel the whole time.