Audi TTS to Take on Pikes Peak, Without a Driver - Wheels Blog ...
The 12.4-mile Pikes Peak International Hill Climb up winding mountain roads near Colorado Springs, Colo., dates to 1916, and winners, driving just about anything on wheels in a wide variety of classes, have included Mario Andretti and Al Unser. It’s safe to say that the competition has never been won by a car driving itself, but Chris Gerdes, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford , is out to change that.
“Shelley” is an Audi TTS that looks basically stock — until you notice that it’s hitting the highway with nobody in the driver’s seat. It’s being prepared to run up Pikes Peak as early as next year at speeds approaching 130 miles an hour with full computer and GPS control. Test runs will be done with a “safety driver,” but then Shelley goes it alone. “The timeline is dictated by how quickly we can convince ourselves that the overall system is safe,” Mr. Gerdes said.
Autonomous driving may conjure a picture of a remote operator sitting at a simulator, but the reality is more complex — and more interesting — than that. The car will take in information at a rate of 500 times a second, Mr. Gerdes said, using gyroscopes, accelerometers and its GPS system to increase speed, brake and locate the boundaries of the road. “The car is making decisions itself,” he said. “It has some of the same knowledge racecar drivers have of how fast it can go on each part of the track.”
Mr. Gerdes, a mechanical engineering professor, directs the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. The university has teamed up with Volkswagen , which last year announced a $5.75 million grant to Stanford to create the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. One of the more interesting products of VW’s interest in operator-free driving is a Web page that imagines the world of 2028 , with a video of a father and son team using virtual reality projections to pick a car for the day. They muse over the traffic jams and highway carnage of bygone days as the car (a futuristic Volkswagen) delivers itself and takes them for a ride.
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