The Drone Racing League unveiled its first autonomous drone, the RacerAI, before the DRL’s new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing circuit holds its first autonomous drone racing event today at UCF's Addition Financial Arena. Orlando is the first leg of the four-event series, which will also have stops in DC (Nov. 2), Baltimore (Nov. 15) and the championship in Austin (Dec. 6). The AIRR races will feature nine identical drones operated via AI developed by nine teams from Lockheed Martin’s AlphaPilot Challenge. The teams came from 424 applicants in 81 countries that responded to Lockheed’s open challenge to advance AI tech.
At the end of the season, the winning AIRR drone will race against the '19 DRL Allianz World Championship-winning pilot. Lockheed is contributing $2M over the next two years to support the initiative and has offered a $250,000 bonus to the first AI team that beats a human pilot. “We’ll watch the DRL RacerAI get faster and smarter, catch up to human competitors, and, one day, outpace the best pilot in the world,” said DRL Founder & CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski.
