In a novel offering, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing company today launched 1/18th scale robotic self-driving cars along with a racing league to go with them as a way to encourage the development of reinforcement learning technology.

Called the AWS DeepRacer, the car is being pitched as an “interesting and fun way to get started with reinforcement learning.” Reinforcement learning is an advanced machine learning technique that takes a different approach to training models in that it can learn complex behaviors without requiring any labeled training data.

Developers can train and tweak machine learning models in an online simulator and then use the DeepRacer as a test platform for the training. The cars were introduced today at Amazon Web Services Inc.’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

The vehicle includes an Intel Atom processor, a 4-megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, WiFi, multiple USB ports and a two-hour battery. The Atom processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Robot Operating System and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.

“AWS DeepRacer includes a fully configured cloud environment that you can use to train your reinforcement learning models,” Amazon Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a blog post. “It takes advantage of the new Reinforcement Learning feature in Amazon SageMaker and also includes a 3D simulation environment powered by AWS RoboMaker.”

Barr added that developers can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or download them to an AWS DeepRacer car and verify performance in the real world.

In an interesting twist, Amazon also announced the creation of the AWS DeepRacer League, a competition that will allow owners of the devices to race their self-driving vehicles against each other on physical tracks at AWS events across the globe.

Winners and top scorers from each event will then advance to the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.

The AWS DeepRacer is available for pre-order for $249 for shipping March 6, 2019, with a general list price of $399.

Images: AWS