Artificial intelligence applied to motorsport for track limit management
15.03.2024
At the Vallelunga Autodrome with Mermec Engineering to experiment and innovate.
At the Piero Taruffi Autodromo in Vallelunga, Thursday 14 March was dedicated to technological experimentation. The Campagnano circuit in Rome was in fact the site of a demonstration of the innovative track limit management system developed by Mermec Engineering (a company part of Angel Holding, led by President Cav. Vito Pertosa, which develops solutions for the railway, mechatronics and digital and aerospace).
Opening the dance was Niccolò Chierroni, CEO of Mermec Engineering, who made the presentations by briefly introducing the virtuous history of the company in the field of innovation: “we are part of the Mermec Group, a 100% Italian company that has been working around the world for more than 50 years, in sectors in which high technology and attention to safety is fundamental. Ours is a technological holding that operates in the railway, aerospace and satellite sectors, and in recent years we have pushed hard on new technologies and innovation. Among these, fundamental for us is the use of artificial intelligence applied to vision. Mermec Engineering is a company created a couple of years ago through the merger of innovative start-ups and SMEs that we have acquired in the last period, which operates as a group center of excellence on these innovation issues. The mission is to bring our skills to new worlds where the group is not present, such as that of motorsport.”
Then the description of the system, whose conception dates back to last year, with the first experiments in the world of two wheels, then the contact with ACI, to expand the experimentation to four wheels. “The idea was born from the interaction with the Race Direction, which then finds itself during the races having to manage many track limit reports, which are often not clearly objectified. This therefore gives rise to disputes and management problems. We therefore thought that our automatic video analysis systems, therefore artificial intelligence applied to computer vision, could be of support.” Chierroni explained. The system is therefore able to automatically recognize the cars on the track, monitoring whether they exceed a limit line in careful curves. Following the identification of the infringement, the Race Direction receives an extract of the video in real time, combined with a history of the information, thus being able to proceed with the possible application of sanctions. A simple and intuitive system which can symbiotically link to the cameras already present in the circuit and provides precision in the order of centimetres, mainly dependent on the resolution of the cameras installed. Versatility is also among the strong points, with the “limit lines” easily adaptable to any type of curve.
Among the numerous attendees, the President of the Automobile Club of Italy, Angelo Sticchi Damiani, also present was Francesco Sticchi Damiani, in his capacity as national and international inspector, as well as member of the Circuit Commission. Also present, naturally, were the hosts Carlo Alessi, President of ACI Vallelunga and Alfredo Scala, Director of the Vallelunga Autodrome and the Monza National Autodrome.
Also observing the innovative system were Marco Ferrari, Central Director of the Federation’s Motor Sport Directorate, and Marco Rogano, General Director of ACI Sport.
The response of the President of the ACI was positive, immediately after taking part in the presentation: “the impression is excellent: an innovative and reliable technology. I believe that exploiting certain opportunities offered by artificial intelligence is fundamental, also to best respond to the challenges of the future.”
The second part of the meeting was held in Race Direction, where Simone Nardi Technical Program Manager of Mermec Engineering gave a practical demonstration of the system, making use of the collaboration of an exceptional tester such as Raffaele Giammaria, pilot and Director of the ACI Sport Federal School and from the Specialist Motorsport Academy, climbed into an Audi TCR and ready to put the wheels outside the edge of the track to check the reactivity of the system. The practical demonstration of the operation during the second part of the meeting was simple and smooth, in which further questions were then accepted from the public, aimed at testing the different possibilities of application in a competition context.