self-driving car for programmers

By Jeffrey Dastin LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Self-driving cars, meet Amazon’s self-driving toys. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit announced a $399 autonomous car on Wednesday aimed at helping web developers try out some of their own self-driving technologies. Customers can train and modify machine-learning models in an online simulator, then test them in vehicles one-eighteenth the size of a real race car. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is even creating a sports league and championship trophy based on races employees have entered using its car model, the AWS DeepRacer. “It’s gotten pretty competitive,” AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy said at the cloud company’s annual conference in Las Vegas. “We had to remind people that we were actually trying to build this and run it for customers. But for us, it was actually interesting and educational.” He added of the upcoming competition: “This is the world’s first global autonomous racing league open to the public.” The news is another opportunity for the world’s No. 1 cloud computing company to encourage people to try out its machine learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker, by applying them to a car. It also raises questions about Amazon’s interest in autonomous vehicles, an exploding area that has attracted major investment from both automakers and technology companies, most notably Amazon’s rival Alphabet Inc. Simulations similar to Amazon’s proposed races are common in academic circles that study how traffic management will work in the era of autonomous cars. Of course, autonomous vehicles rely on sensors, lidars and other components that are not the focus of AWS DeepRacer. Amazon has previously hosted what it called “Robocar Rallies,” focusing on the behavioral cloning technology that AWS DeepRacer’s events will now replace. (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by David Gregorio)