Recently @Drone Racing League and @Lockheed Martin visited Austin, Texas as part of a series of drone races that pitted man against machine. The AIRR racing series stands for Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing and took place this fall in four US cities. This drone racing series brought together teams of programmers from around the world to compete for a one million dollar prize. Each team was given an identical drone to work with and had to program it to complete a course using code only as its pilot - no human interaction at all with the drone. And the winner of each AI race then had to race against a human pilot, in this case @Gab707 from @Drone Racing League This entire event is part of the @Lockheed Martin AlphaPilot program, designed to foster innovation in the artificial intelligence and aviation worlds.

While AIs are increasingly beating us mere mortals at many things, racing drones is something we still have the upper hand at. The Drone Racing League (DRL) orchestrated its first AI racing competitions this year, with the final of a four-part series held in Texas earlier this month. The races aim to advance the development and testing of fully autonomous drone technologies for real-world applications including disaster relief, search and rescue missions, and space exploration. The DRL RacerAI is the first autonomous drone designed to defeat a human in a physical sport. The drone features the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier AI-at-the-edge compute platform in addition to four onboard stereoscopic cameras which enable the AI to detect and identify objects with twice the field of view as human pilots.