Former air base in Sint-Truiden chosen to test AI in self-driving racing car to the max
At the local air base in Sint-Truiden, which is now also the location of DronePort, a new home for start-ups, growth companies and centres of expertise, an American self-driving racing car is completing laps around a track, completely autonomously. But does the artificial intelligence onboard that racing car have the potential to enhance our everyday mobility as a whole?
In the near future, some 500 students from some 50 universities worldwide will be dedicating their efforts to conducting high-tech research of that kind. Flanders, and more specifically Sint-Truiden, was chosen as the ideal test site for the racing car. Nearby are the innovative research centres of Leuven and Eindhoven on the one hand, and the racing circuits at Zolder and Francorchamps on the other. If the car autonomously makes the right decisions at a speed of 300 km/h on a race track, it should also be capable of doing so in highly complex and sometimes treacherous traffic situations on public roads. After all, drivers can slow down or jump in between one vehicle and another in unpredictable ways, the vehicle itself can suffer a blowout and so on. As a road user, it's virtually impossible to react to these situations safely and appropriately. The long-term goal of the project is for those types of decisions to be entrusted to AI.
The racing car on the track is just the start. The end point is to enable autonomous mobility for all modes of transportation – cars, trucks, buses, trains, boats, aircraft, industrial automation, robots, entertainment, etc.