Hi,
If you feel tired from racing the sim, why not take a break and program
a racing robot! Now it is a good time to start participating in RARS -
Robot Auto Racing Simulator.
Next week a new series of RARS, dedicated to absolute beginners will
start. RARS is a programming contest where everyone can participate - no
previous education in programming or physics is required. Just read our
tutorials and start the race! Briefly, your task is to make a program
that gets data about its situation every 1/20 seconds and in response
tells the main program your desired values of steering wheel angle and
speed. We have plenty of tutorial robots, so you do not have to start
from scratch. Rather correct model of real physics is used to move your
robot-car around the track. Pitting for fuel and repair is possible
now, so you can take advantage from your own pitting strategy. Up to 24
robots will compete in one race. Finish first and you are the Winner!
The new series -BORS- (for Beginners Oval Racing Series) is about to
start and 8 races will be run (2 each week, starting from 14th of May).
You can join it any time. Designing of robot for the oval tracks is
easy. All turns are left turns and you don't have to think about
chicanes. Even more - the program code of robots is open e.g. you can
get ideas from your competitors code to get the pace quicker.
For more information read
http://evolution.bmc.uu.se/~maido/rars/rars.htm or
another RARS racing series currently run by Ralph Scott
other racing tracks.
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Maido Remm,
ESTONIA
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Hey,
If you are at all interested in this kind of stuff, check it out.
The racing application itself is wonderful. The AI programming
looks to be fun ("What corner speed?", "What braking point?",
"If there is someone in front of me, which side do I try to
pass on", etc.)
It was pretty easy to compile in my VC++5. (10 minutes)
Once you get it running, modifying one of the demo AI
sub-programs and recompiling looks trivial to accomplish.
(That is: although you need a C++ compiler and some small level
of programming skill just to run the compiler, doing the actual
AI programming stuff in the control subroutine shouldn't take
any great level of programming skill beyond a basic familiarity
with C.) Getting your AI to go fast in traffic might be another
matter though! ;)
Although the physics is a bit um, interesting ;) the
whole system makes up a pretty fun little
optimization problem.
- Matt
