A new system will come into effect in Formula 1 in which artificial intelligence checks whether cars adhere to the circuit boundaries.
In the fastest motorsport competition, thousandths of a second make the difference. At high speeds it is even more difficult to avoid crossing the circuit lines, to approach corners optimally and thus achieve the best possible lap times. Artificial intelligence can help push that limit more safely, without the pilots risking penalty time. It should mainly become a control tool for the officials.
The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) says in a statement that she will use the Computer Vision technology during the last Grand Prix of the season, in Abu Dhabi, this weekend. The artificial intelligence uses shape analysis to determine the number of pixels in images that exceed the boundaries of the circuit.
Computer Vision does not (yet) replace officials
For the time being, the FIA does not yet plan to make such reviews take place fully automatically. The organization wants to make the work of the officials easier by burdening them with fewer doubts. Reuters knows that during the Grand Prix in Australia, no fewer than 1,200 possible violations had to be checked by just four officials.
Computer Vision has also been used in the medical sector to check data during cancer screenings. “The AI was not used to diagnose cancer, but it was used to eliminate 80 percent of cases where there was no cancer at all. The well-trained staff can then focus on the 20 percent that matter,” said Tim Malyon, assistant director and head of remote operations at the FIA.
The federation hopes to limit the number of infringements per race to 50. Although the FIA does not immediately plan to have AI make real decisions, Malyon expects this to happen in the long term. “I have said several times that humans still have the upper hand in certain areas. That may be the case now, but in the future there may be a fully automatic system that makes decisions in real time.”
