The Unimore team car had dominated the race until the last lap when an electronic problem caused the system to go haywire, thus ruining the dream of winning the million dollar first prize
ABU DHABI (United Arab Emirates) – Self-driving supercar, the car from the University of Modena came third in the Abu Dhabi race. The Unimore team car had dominated the race until the last lap when an electronic problem caused the system to go haywire, thus ruining the dream of winning the million dollar first prize. The million dollar prize for the winners of the inaugural race, in Abu Dhabi, of the Autonomous Racing League competition for self-driving cars vanished on the last lap for the Unimore Racing team. The red car from Modena has always been in the lead, setting both the fastest lap and the maximum speed on the track, but on the last lap an electronic problem left the car blind for a few moments, sending it to “zero speed”, in a condition of safety. A setback which caused the Unimore car to slip to third place, out of the 8 teams from all over the world present. The fully autonomous cars, managed by artificial intelligence, competed to win the prize pool of over two million dollars, in a race that attracted over 20,000 spectators on the circuit and over 600 thousand spectators online. “It’s the second time that a million-dollar prize has eluded us on the last lap, after having led the race to the end with the best times,” commented Prof. Marko Bertogna, head of the Unimore Racing Team. “In Indianapolis we made a mistake in coding the number of laps, an error that went down in history as the million dollar bug. In Abu Dhabi, however, we had an electronic problem that blinded the car for a few moments, causing it to stop for a few seconds.” Satisfied, however, with the teamwork among the sectors of excellence of our university which in the preparatory phase also involved Unimore doctoral students and students together with researchers and programmers from the Unimore High-Performance Real-Time Laboratory, a university spinoff that deals with develop algorithmic and software solutions for high-performance real-time systems.
Unimore Autonomous Racing League
