Audi to climb Pikes peak without a driver

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brian
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Joined: Tue Jul 14, 2009 10:52 am

Audi to climb Pikes peak without a driver

Post by brian »

April 9, 2010: San Jose, CA: AP: Audi to climb Pikes Peak without a driver
Stanford University researchers have developed an auto-pilot Audi which could help make driving safer and one day allow ordinary vehicles to drive on their own. The vehicle, named Shelley, is an Audi TTS that has been equipped with GPS receivers and can be programmed to follow any route using a digital map. The research team has developed computer algorithms that let the car make real-time adjustments to the terrain and calculate how fast it can go without spinning out of control.
At Pikes Peak, Shelley will climb 4,721 feet up the 14,110-foot mountain on paved and gravel roads as it covers the 12.4-mile race course and its 156 turns at high speeds. The feat has never attempted by an autonomous vehicle.
The U.S. Department of Defense has been developing driverless technology that allows unmanned vehicles to perform military missions without endangering soldiers. Its research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has been sponsoring autonomous vehicle contests since 2004 with the goal of making one-third of the military's ground combat vehicles driverless by 2015.
For more information on Shelley see Stanford Center for Automotive Research
(The director of the Stanford Center for Automotive Research assisted Toyota in refuting the claims by Gilbert that electronics were the cause of the Toyota fiasco)
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brian
Posts: 499
Joined: Tue Jul 14, 2009 10:52 am

Re: Audi to climb Pikes peak without a driver

Post by brian »

April 20, 2010: Some additional information on the driverless Audi TTS race up Pikes Peak in the May 2010 issue of Popular Science. Apparently the TTS doesn’t ‘see’ the road by using cameras, radar or other sensors. It will navigate the harrowing turns of Pikes Peak using differential GPS, and enhanced system that corrects for atmospheric interference to an accuracy of less than an inch, to heel to a preprogrammed digital map. Algorithms will crunch data from wheel sensors, an accelerometer and gyroscopes to determine the right speed, acceleration and direction to ace the course.
I have a couple of issues with that: What is they have a rock slide? The vehicle must have some rudimentary radar to ‘see’ possible obstacles not on the digital map? Guess we'll find out in May 2010!
The magazine is a special issue ‘The Future of the Car’ and includes some interesting articles on future technologies for urban commute and an article on the Fisker Karma, the plug-in hybrid supercar.
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