Today is a historic moment in the world of the DeepRacer League: the start of contenders racing against each other.
With the changes introduced in this season came three categories of racing, one of them was head-to-head racing. You might think what I’m saying is therefore wrong. Let me however explain.
In the first part of the month it’s key to ensure all racers experience consistent racing conditions. Because of that the other cars on track are bots that behave similarly in each submission. In other words the time trial part of the race is a moving objects avoidance challenge.
Racers continue to submit their models and improve their times just like in two other categories till the end of month and then things change.
Top 32 racers are placed in a knockouts single elimination bracket where they race against each other and the winners progress to the next round. This is the first time racers publicly race against each other and winners will progress to next group.
Anything can happen today and this makes it super exciting. Some racers have simply used their time trial models hoping for a lucky drive, others spent more time and had a reasonable time (as in fast enough for top 32) but the car acted smarter, stayed on track, reacted to objects around it. What if someone has trained to zig-zag when a car approaches from the back? This is what we will find out.
You can check the brackets progress on the AWS DeepRacer Race page.
Here are the dates of next races:
- Top 32: 2nd April 2020
- Top 16: 3rd April 2020
- Quarterfinals: 9th April 2020
- Semifinals: 9th April 2020
- Final: 9th April 2020
Let’s have a quick look at the bracket:
We can see quite a few names from the 2019 season, including the finalists and community members. Which races do you think will be the most interesting?