![]() Each car measures 3.1 inches long by 1.75 inches wide by 0.98 inch tall. The $199 Anki Drive starter kit comes with a large track mat measuring 102 inches wide by 42 inches long, a yellow car named "Kourai" and a silver one named "Boson." If you want additional cars, you can purchase the blue "Katal" and the red "Rho" for $69 each. These are not preprogrammed movements - all the AI needs are certain parameters in which it can move, such as the speed of the vehicle and how fast it can steer - and it'll think of the actions on its own.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy. With these factors in place, the cars are able to determine, often within a few thousandths of a second, whether to take over, nudge, pass or block their opponents depending on the prescribed objective. The iOS app is essentially the brains of the operation and not only lets you engage in gameplay by steering the vehicle and firing weapons, but also lets you build a "character" for each car, which we'll describe shortly. Each car has a tiny camera underneath that can read and translate that information along with a couple of motors that power the rear wheels, a 50Mhz microprocessor, a power button, a multicolor status LED on top, a rechargeable battery and a Bluetooth LE radio that communicates with the phone. Underneath the black exterior of the mat is a special ink that's embedded with a positional code that tells the car where it is in relation to the track and to other vehicles. Join us after the break as we give you a tour of how it works, share our brief hands-on impressions and tell you how you can get your hands on one yourself.Īs we detailed back in June, Anki Drive is primarily made up of three components: the track mat, the car and the iOS app. They've kept pretty quiet since then, but four months later, and they're ready to reveal the final Anki Drive product to the world. It impressed Apple so much that the Cupertino company invited the team to unveil the product on the world stage at the WWDC keynote this year. Their solution was Anki Drive, a slot car racing game that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning so that the vehicles actually adapt and learn how to best each other on the track. As lovers of cars and video games, the group decided that a way to do this was to focus on a way to make physical toys as adaptable and as challenging as video games. The primary barrier was cost, of course, but as the price of hardware kept getting lower and as smartphones became more powerful and ubiquitous, the trio figured that the time was ripe for consumer robotics. program at Carnegie Mellon University, they noticed that a vast majority of robotics and artificial intelligence research went into government and industrial sectors, with very little of it focusing on the consumer. "Instead, we use maybe 90 percent of the processing power dedicated to the artificial intelligence.Six years ago, when Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci and Hanns Tappeiner were enrolled in the robotics Ph.D. "Eighty percent of a video game's processing power goes towards graphics, but the graphics here are the physical world," said Sofman. ![]() The iPhone and iPod Touch have enough power to function both as a controller and the game console itself. The processing power required for those quick calculations don't actually need to be calculated by a supercomputer or even a standard desktop computer. "All the cars are equipped with sensors and software that can monitor position 500 times each second." "If you were to scale them up, these cars would be going 250 miles per hour," he told ABC News. It may seem that taking the steering out of driving would also take out the fun, but Sofman said that this allows the cars to zip around as quickly as they do. What they do have is control over how their cars behave, from deciding what upgrades to apply to improve a car's abilities to deciding what weapons to deploy to mess up rivals. Players won't be physically steering their vehicles the same way they would a remote-controlled car. Players start the racing game by picking one of four different race cars, each programmed with its own "personality" that determines how it navigates the track. Tesla Motors Announces Plan For Automated Drivingĭrive is like Mario Kart brought into the physical world.
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