AWS DeepRacer: Where racing meets machine learning

The car of tomorrow, most of us imagine, is being built by the great automobile manufacturers. More and more, however, we are seeing information technology (IT) companies joining the race to power the autonomous vehicle future.

Last year, chipmaker Intel paid $15.3 billion (R208 billion) to acquire Israeli company Mobileye, a leader in computer vision for autonomous driving technology. Google’s autonomous taxi division Waymo is valued at $45 billion.

Now there’s a new name to add to the roster of technology giants driving the future.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s biggest cloud computing service and a subsidiary of Amazon.com, last week unveiled a scale model autonomous racing car for developers to build new artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Almost in the same breath, at its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, it showcased the work being done with machine learning (ML) in Formula 1 racing.

AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale fully autonomous race car, designed to incorporate the features and behaviour of a full-sized vehicle. It boasts all-wheel drive, monster truck tyres, an HD video camera, and onboard computing power. In short, everything a kid would want of a self-driving toy car.

It uses a new form of ML, the technology that allows computer systems to improve their functions progressively as they receive feedback from their activities. ML is at the heart of AI, and will be core to autonomous, self-driving vehicles.

AWS has taken ML a step further, with an approach called reinforcement learning. This allows for quicker development of ML models and applications, and DeepRacer is designed to allow developers to experiment with and hone their skill.

It’s built on top of another AWS platform, called Amazon SageMaker, which enables developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy ML quickly and easily.

Along with DeepRacer, AWS also announced DeepRacer League, the world’s first global autonomous racing league. As if to prove that DeepRacer is not just a quirky entry into the motor racing world, AWS showcased the work it is doing with the Formula One Group.

Ross Brawn, Formula One’s managing director of Motor Sport, joined AWS chief executive Andy Jassy at the re:Invent conference to demonstrate how motor racing meets ML.

“Over a million data points a second are transmitted between car and team during an F1 race,” Brawn said. “From this data, we can make predictions about what we expect to happen in a wheel-to-wheel situation, overtaking advantage, and pit-stop advantage. ML can help us apply a proper analysis of a situation.”

Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee