AWS DeepRacer League 2022 Update #1

March ended with the first races of the League and some exciting results. Let’s see who qualified into the finale and who will need to try harder in April. Also, let’s check out who will join the Pro league. We also have the first EMEA Summit winner from Brussels!

All the data for this article has been obtained from the deepracer-race-data repository.

AWS DeepRacer

AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale autonomous race car but also much more. It is a complete program that has helped thousands of employees in numerous organizations begin their educational journey into machine learning through fun and rivalry.

Visit AWS DeepRacer page to learn more about how it can help you and your organization begin and progress the journey towards machine learning.

Join the AWS Machine Learning Community to talk to people who have used DeepRacer in their learning experience.

You might be interested in other posts from our blog

• AWS DeepRacer League Championships 2024 – the last race
• AWS DeepRacer League 2024 Championship Finals – The Last (Competitive) Dance!
• My Journey with DeepRacer
• Revolutionizing Computer Science Education: The DeepRacer Autonomous Race Experience
• DeepRacer-for-Cloud v5.2.2 now available with new real-time training metrics
• Announcing AWS DeepRacer League 2024. New year, new rules

AWS DeepRacer News

Invitation: AWS DeepRacer League March Finale: Monday 11th April 2022

Join the AWS Twitch channel on Monday 11th of April 2022 at 15:00 UTC (Check other time zones here) for some live action where the 16 racers listed below will race for the first three Virtual League spots in the finals.

Invitation: AWS Summits in April

We’re racing in person! Be sure to visit AWS Summits Page and register for one (or more) to compete and qualify into the finals! These are the summits of interest in April:

• Paris: Tuesday 12th April 2022 (our one and only AI Devices Solutions Architect David Smith will be streaming live from the Summit on the Twitch DeepRacer Channel)
• San Francisco: Wednesday-Thursday 20th-21st April 2022
• London: Wednesday 27th April 2022

April races have begun

Visit the AWS Console to join the races in April. We’ve got two great tracks to tackle. Ace Speedway and Ace Super Speedway have been named after the AWS DeepRacer League 2021 runner up JPMC-Ace-Hyderabad. The Open Division track has got a great straight, some quick curves and tricky sharper turns and Pro Division track has taken it to the next level with the same straight but also many mind blowing hairpins and chicanes.

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Ace Speedwar and Ace Super Speedway (Source: AWS DeepRacer Console)

AWS Summit Brussels – Results

It’s been too long since the last in person summit race in 2019 but now the wait is over! On the 31st of March around 40 racers competed to select the first two participants of the EMEA Summit Online finale: DBro and Chris. You can watch some live action streamed on the AWS DeepRacer Twitch channel.

Pro Division

Race Info:

• 76.76 meters long
• 107 centimetres wide
• Head-to-bot format with four bot cars cruising at 4 m/s with no lane changes
• Racers are trying to complete three laps – all laps are separate from standing start
• Each collision results in a three seconds penalty
• Each driving off the track results in a three seconds penalty
• Top 16 go on into a live race which will be streamed on Twitch to fight for places in the League Finals
• 10 best racers who haven’t yet done so win an AWS DeepRacer EVO

All submissions
Update time: 2022-04-01 01:00:00.000000 UTC

Racers: 82
Total submission attempts: 92413
Best total time: 01:11.254 by JJ
Mean total time: 02:10.338146341
Best lap: 00:23.471 by JJ
Mean best lap: 00:40.680231707
Mean average lap: 00:43.445682927

82 racers is a good prognostic for this season – last year we started in March with 70 Pro racers. With such numbers we should expect more virtual participants in the run up to the finals. If you have been following these updates last year it will be no surprise to you to see JJ at the top of the standings. Again. That said, this was not an easy victory. Let’s have a look at how the top 25 racers did:

Top 25 submissions
Update time: 2022-04-01 01:00:00.000000 UTC

Racers: 25
Total submission attempts: 58805
Best total time: 01:11.254 by JJ
Mean total time: 01:16.982560
Best lap: 00:23.471 by JJ
Mean best lap: 00:25.270200
Mean average lap: 00:25.660480

The differences are relatively small here, and this is what I’ve heard from some of the racers who narrowly missed making it into the top 16 – the competition was fierce and times were improving till the last seconds of the race.

The time differences remind my of the most competitive races of the last season and this is in the first month already!

Most of the racers have been around for a long time already and it’s not surprising to see them at the top of the league table. All of them have taken part in at least one finale race last year.

Open Division

Race Info:

• 48.07 meters long
• 107 centimetres wide
• Time Trial format
• Racers are trying to complete three laps – all laps are separate from standing start
• Each driving off the track results in a three seconds penalty
• Top 10% qualify into the Pro Division and win a Pro Division Welcome Pack

All submissions
Update time: 2022-04-01 01:00:00.000000 UTC

Racers: 1273
Total submission attempts: 18195
Best total time: 00:40.995 by Roster-HTC
Mean total time: 02:23.141399843
Best lap: 00:13.329 by Roster-HTC
Mean best lap: 00:45.925369992
Mean average lap: 00:47.713476826

We’ve had 1273 racers which compared to 972 in 2021 also presents a nice boost from the start. I wonder if we’ll see new all time high – the highest participation to date has been in October 2021 with 2806 racers.

The winner, Roster-HTC, has done a great job and presented very smooth behaviour on track. I wonder if it’s this HTC that they are representing.

1273 racers means 127 new Pro racers in April. Nice! But wait, that’s not all 😀

Top 25 submissions
Update time: 2022-04-01 01:00:00.000000 UTC

Racers: 25
Total submission attempts: 5374
Best total time: 00:40.995 by Roster-HTC
Mean total time: 00:47.755
Best lap: 00:13.329 by Roster-HTC
Mean best lap: 00:15.513040
Mean average lap: 00:15.918

In the top 25 we can see some close times. More interestingly, top 25 racers represent almost 30% of the submission count of the whole group. This makes me suspect there has been a rather active group towards the top of the division.

I decided to dig in a little and I found JJ and Duckworth in that list. That’s right: We have some unexpected participants in the Open Division data! Now that I found it I remembered that there was a little tiny bit of a configuration problem and Pro racers were able to submit to Open Division and not to Pro for a brief moment. They have been reintroduced to Pro but their entries remained in the records. This means that it’s not quite clear to me who qualifies into the Pro division. I’ll try and make a guess by removing them from the list and trying again.

I use Pandas to handle the race data. I have a standings Dataframe for pro: pro_df and for open: open_df. The below allows me to get only Open racers:

x = open_df.append(pro_df).drop_duplicates('UserId', keep='last')
x = x=='OPEN']

With that I got 1236 racers which should mean 123 new Pro racers. Let’s see them (just note that the positions in the list below have not been fixed and represent values from the Dataframe where the Pro racers were still present):

NumericLambda#6670 has (according to my guess on how AWS have interpreted the current situation) made it into the Pro Division as the last person in March, with a time of 01:07.980.

A quick glance over the list has drawn my attention to a few of know racers who returned to racing in March: Boltronic, ADA, Bandwidth-RnD (who has published a great article on racing recently), leo-DNPds, IcePandaBoom to name a few. Welcome back, friends! And to everyone else in this list: Welcome and let’s make friends in the Community Discord!