Amazon Web Services Inc. will be treating attendees of its re:Invent conference next week to some artificial intelligence-powered entertainment.

The conference will host the company’s second annual AWS DeepRacer League, a racing series starring the AWS DeepRacer, a miniature remote-controlled car that developers can configure with custom autonomous driving models. The cloud giant today revealed an enhanced, lidar-powered model along with new initiatives meant to boost user participation in the contest.

The AWS DeepRacer League plays a surprisingly big role in the provider’s developer outreach efforts. As a major provider of machine learning services, AWS has an interest to get as many programmers as possible interested in machine learning, and its AI-powered RC car is proving highly effective at advancing that goal. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr shared today that tens of thousands of developers have participated to date in the races held at the company’s global user events. 

The AWS DeepRacer apparently even helped the provider win some additional business from enterprises. “We have seen that DeepRacer has sparked interest in machine learning from our enterprise customers, and has inspired them to start multiple production-grade ML projects,” Barr wrote.

The new DeepRacer Evo model the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary unveiled today enhances the original’s design with an extra lidar sensor and a pair of depth-sensing stereo cameras. It will become available in early 2020, along with a sensor kit that will enable developers to upgrade their existing cars.

“The added sensors will enable DeepRacer Evo to skillfully detect and respond to obstacles, including other DeepRacers,” Barr said. “This will help you to learn even more about the exciting field of reinforcement learning, which is ideal for use in autonomous driving.”

The cloud giant plans to up the number of in-person and virtual AWS DeepRacer League contests it holds worldwide to 54. In addition, AWS is adding two more race types: One will require participants to equip their cars with AI that can navigate around obstacles, while the other will pit DeepRacers against each other on the same track. 

In conjunction, Deloitte Ltd. is launching a league of its own that will span 30 tracks in 17 countries.

AWS is working to make AI more accessible for developers in other ways as well. On Tuesday, it debuted new features that enable customers to use  SQL queries to run machine learning models on data in its S3 storage service and the Aurora managed relational database. The direct SQL support allows developers to skip many of the skips previously required to make their models work on the two services. 

Photo: AWS