A new system designed to semi-automate the process of identifying spectators in unsafe locations has completed its first trial on an FIA rally event, ahead of long-term plans to roll it out widely across continental and national championships.
The FIA trialled its new Artificial Intelligence Safety Camera (AISC) system on Rally Sierra Morena earlier this month, which is designed to identify spectators stood in unsafe positions automatically rather than requiring constant manual observation.
A camera mounted on competing cars captures spectator locations in real time, with AI technology helping flag unsafely positioned spectators to event officials immediately.
The system aims to reduce the level of human monitoring required and shorten action times when a hazardous situation is identified – so is aimed at events smaller in scale than the World Rally Championship.
“With stages often taking place in remote, unpredictable environments, ensuring that fans are in safe locations is both a challenge and a responsibility,” said Nuno Costa, FIA safety director. “The introduction of the AI Safety Camera allows us to take a huge leap forward in how we monitor and manage risk during events.”
Spectator safety is a critical issue: ensuring organizers and competitors can obtain liability insurance is key to the continued existence of rallying as a discipline, which becomes more challenging and expensive to obtain when spectator-related incidents occur.
“This technology isn’t about restricting fans, it’s about protecting them,” Costa affirmed. “It allows organisers and officials to respond rapidly and ultimately allows them to prevent accidents before they happen.”
How does it work?
With regional and national events often surpassing the 100-entrant mark in some markets, and the scale of monitoring required to actively cast an eye over every live stage mile of a rally too vast for non-world championship events, relying on manual observation has its limitations. As much as marshals may try to keep tabs on spectators around them, they cannot be everywhere all at once.
With the FIA’s AISC unit, effectively an entire army of onboard cameras is constantly monitoring a stage as it is live as competitors pass through. But the AISC is more than just an onboard camera: it has an built-in graphic processing unit, which allows it to analyze images locally in-car to detect potential spectator safety issues.
Should the onboard unit flag potential danger, data is then transmitted to a web-based user interface for officials to access, allowing an event’s chief safety officer to pinpoint the exact location of unsafely positioned spectators.
This implementation solves a key headache: bandwidth. A constant stream of live video from remote locations is an extremely challenging undertaking without dedicated infrastructure (like the aeroplane that WRC Promoter uses to provide signal for its All Live video service, for example). Having image analysis handed within the onboard camera would eliminate such complexity. All potential issues identified by the system are then filtered into an advanced issue management system.
How will it affect the WRC?
It won’t.
This system is separate to those currently utilized in the world championship, which has greater scale and resources than any other rally series.
The AISC is designed for use in smaller scale events, where the automation compensates for a small scale of people resource being available to constantly monitor stages in realtime.
FIA road sport director Emilia Abel explained: “We have very high levels of sophistication and systems at the World Championship levels, and it is very important for us that safety – and particularly spectator safety – is something we continue to develop at the grassroots, national and regional level as well.
“Rally is perhaps the most spectacular form of motor sport, and there is nothing quite like being on a stage watching rally cars in action. We want to make sure spectators can enjoy the sport safely, and the AI Safety Camera can make a real difference by giving organisers a new tool that provides real-time safety information on their events.
“Our message is clearly that this system is here to protect firstly the spectators, and also the sport itself, as we want to see rallying continue to grow and thrive as we move into an exciting new era in the coming years.”
