Team MAVLab received a $1 million cash prize for winning the 2019 Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Championship. Team MAVLab, the drone research lab of the Delft University of Technology, won a $1 million cash prize as the leading AlphaPilot team of the 2019 Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit, the autonomous drone racing series that accelerates AI innovation through futuristic sports competition. The winning team was announced by Lockheed Martin and The Drone Racing League (DRL), the professional drone racing circuit, following the AIRR Championship, which took place Friday (December 6) at the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas. Lockheed Martin sponsored the $1 million cash prize. The AIRR Championship marked the final race of a four-event series that aims 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.

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.