Vodafone's network at the Goodwood Festival of Speed helped driverless car researchers from the Indy Autonomous Challenge in their quest to propel forwards the state of the art.
Fearsomely sleek racing cars leaping down the narrow roads of the Goodwood Festival of Speed are nothing new. But hawk-eyed spectators may have noticed an unusual vehicle at the 2024 Festival – a driverless race car.
The autonomous vehicle wasn’t the work of a Silicon Valley startup, but of the Indy Autonomous Challenge. This tournament organises races between competing multinational teams, each one fielding their own autonomous race car designed by researchers from different universities. The idea is that the competitive spirit of racing will spur advances in autonomous vehicle technology, which will then eventually trickle down to everyday motorists.
“If we can provide safe driving at high speeds on the racetrack, then safe driving at 80mph on a highway suddenly becomes a much more reasonable and realistic prospect,” explained Marc Ferlet, a spokesperson for the Indy Autonomous Challenge.
All of the teams in the tournament are provided with physically identical cars, where the driver’s cockpit is filled with a powerful computer and motorised units for controlling the wheel and pedals. Data about the car’s surroundings is gathered by an onboard suite of sensors – six cameras, two GPS receivers, two radar units and four LIDAR units. This multitude of information is fed to the computer so its software can make driving decisions, from acceleration to overtaking. It’s this decision-making self-driving software that differs most from car to car, as that’s where the teams pour in the bulk of their efforts.
The bulk of the tournament’s races take place on Indy 500-style oval tracks, but Goodwood was different. Goodwood hosted a single car time trial, rather than a race. More importantly, the haybale-lined track there was narrower with sharper turns, posing more of a challenge for the driverless racing cars compared to their usual racecourses. It’s in this context that Vodafone’s network stepped up to lend a hand.
The 4G connection not only allowed the onsite engineers to stop the car in an emergency. It also allowed them to collect valuable data to help further refine the self-driving software, everything from the car’s velocity and location to the pressure and temperature of its tyres.
“All this data is fantastically useful for us to improve the algorithms as we iteratively improve our platform,” Marc Ferlet told Vodafone UK News.
As the tall trees and leaf cover along the track can block the 4G signal from Vodafone’s nearby permanent mast, the company worked with Indy Autonomous Challenge and the Goodwood organisers to install a series of temporary masts along the racetrack.
Without Vodafone’s network, the Challenge engineers would’ve had to use their previous, much more hair-raising method of maintaining a data link with the race car. Another vehicle, such as an SUV, would tightly follow the race car so as to be close enough to establish a short-range wireless link through custom antennas installed on both vehicles.
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“You can feel anxious riding in that SUV, because that race car can stop a lot faster than the SUV can,” Ferlet said, remembering his own experience of the ‘chase car’ as it was known. An experience that wasn’t necessary during the Goodwood time trials thanks to Vodafone’s network.
Ferlet acknowledges the difficulty in bringing fully autonomous vehicles to roads beyond the racetrack, but he doesn’t see it as an all-or-nothing goal. Advances made by the Indy Auto Challenge could eventually lead to features short of full self-driving, such as more advanced lane assist and cruise control features which would still be invaluable to, for example, long-distance haulage drivers.
Behind the optimism and enthusiasm of everyone at the Indy Autonomous Challenge lies a deep sense of responsibility. Marc Ferlet: “When you’re working on infrastructure, where actual lives are at stake, you can’t
‘move fast and break things’.”
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