Roborace engineer clarifies why a driverless racecar drove into a wall

A video of a unfortunate (but kinda amusing) Roborace incident got out and about on Thursday. It demonstrated a SIT Acronis Autonomous racecar quickly veering to one side toward the beginning of a lap and colliding with a divider.

A specialist from SIT has since taken to Reddit to clarify how the humiliating episode occurred during the Season Beta 1.1 race.

They composed that an issue developed during the instatement lap, in which a human driver takes the vehicle to the beginning line. A mistake happened which made the directing lock right to one side.

“When our car was given [permission] to drive, the acceleration command went as normal but the steering was locked to the right,” the architect composed. “We are looking at the log values and can see that our controller was trying to steer the car back to the left, but the car did not execute the steering command due to a steering lock. The desired trajectory was also good; the car definitely did not plan to go into the wall.”

The designer recommended it was “an extremely rare event during which there was a short spike in the inputs to the controller.” Although SIT has made some fixes trying to alleviate the issue, it needed to send the vehicle back to the production line for repairs. All things considered, it ran the race’s second round utilizing a default Roborace vehicle.