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Stanford's Self Driving Car Tops 120mph On Racetrack
kkleiner writes with this snippet: "Just as Google's self-driving Prius goes for distance, recently passing 300,000 miles, Stanford's self-driving Audi TTS instead has the need for speed. The Audi, known as Shelley, sped around the Thunderhill Raceway track north of Sacramento topping 120 miles per hour on straightaways. The less than two and a half minutes it took to complete the 3-mile course is comparable to times achieved by professional drivers." Now if only Montana could take a cue from Nevada's rules for self-driving cars, and bring back "reasonable and prudent" speed regulation, driving out west could get a lot more exciting.
I believe that the link "Montana's rules for self-driving cars" should have read "Nevada's rules for self-driving cars".
I wish I had a robot car.
[quote]driving out west could get a lot more exciting.[/quote] Nothing exciting about sitting in a driverless sh1tbox and probably soaking up pre-made entertainment content and a few Google targetted ads. Would rather drive the thing myself, despite the miniscule chance of me crashing into a people carrier with 6 kids inside and killing everyone including myself
I would expect a computer-controlled car to do well in these kinds of situations. On a fixed course with no other cars, it comes down to calculating the optimal trajectories, and being able to accurately estimate things like when your tires are about to lose traction. Computers are probably better at that than humans are, given enough data. I mean, cars and tired are already designed with computer simulations of those kinds of conditions.
Google's self-driving cars being able to drive in regular traffic was more of a surprise to me: something I would've have expected for another decade.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd really like to see a video of that. How do the cars adapt.. or fail to adapt.
What's the point of failure or do they all behave prudently as more and more cars are on the track?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Speed limits are for tourists and drunks.
Isn't this roughly BMW's track trainer? http://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/11/bmw-330i-races-around-the-top-gear-track-without-a-driver/
Seems like it did impressively well on the top gear test track, but a 330i is much slower than a TTS... (Clarkson does mention you can fit it to a M3 though)
I would like to see them test their robot cars in the congested downtown streets of a large city. With the window washers too.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I grew up in Montana under the "reasonable and prudent" speed limit. Man, I miss those days. The problem was that too many tourists came in that didn't know the roads and got themselves killed, so the feds threatened to yank our highway money unless we changed the law. Unless you can do away with either the Federal government or idiot tourists, it's probably not coming back.
That is a 5% chance of death at 20 mph and a 45% chance of death at 30 mph. Higher than that it plateaus near certain death.
Racetracks are known quantities, down to every minute detail. Back in the 90s, when the F1 cars were loaded with every possible form of electronics, the computer was programmed with every turn on every track. All the driver had to do was stomp on the gas and let the car handle the maximum traction, braking, etc for every place on the track. Even the prime steering track can be programmed in. Ever played any of the more recent driving simulations?
I can appreciate the achievement to some extent. The ability to sense where it is, and things of those nature are impressive to me, but lets see how the car would do in a pack of other drivers where conditions weren't always ideal. If you could convince other race drivers to get on the track with it.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I have quite a bit of HPDE experience.
First off, quoting times around the track is silly unless it was in the same car. Which it wasn't. However, if you want to see what "fast" is, look at the SCCA records for various classes. Spoiler: lap times of 1:39 to 2:12. Read that again: the absolute slowest competitive race time is 2:12, and that was done by someone in a Mazda Miata in a stock racing class (ie, limited modifications.) The Stanford car has more than 100HP over the Miata, all wheel drive, big brakes, and a dual-clutch gearbox that shifts virtually instantly.
120MPH sounds impressive, until you realize that we're talking about a nearly 270HP car and a very open track. 120MPH isn't that hard to hit on many racetracks, even for a novice, and it's not a demonstration of skill; what's a demonstration of skill is how fast you exit each turn. Just by looking, I can tell you the fastest part of the track is between turn 8 and 9, most likely, for high-powered cars; slower, lighter cars may be faster between 9 and 10.
Second: "professional driver" could mean anything from someone who drives a taxi, to someone who races dirt-track, to someone who races Formula 1. Anyone can call themselves a "professional driver."
Third: the way that thing drives itself is absolutely atrocious and reminiscent of the worst kind of first-day HPDE students. The ones who think they know how to drive, don't, and are aggressive. Hammers it down the straights, not smooth with the controls at all, misses the apex (the inside center of the turn) by half a dozen feet, overloads the tires (hear them screaming? That's not a "I'm giving you the most grip" noise, that's a "I'm past my limit and am sliding all over the place" noise)...ugh.
From the way the car dives and rolls, as well as how the 'driver' is thrown around and the steering wheel is jerked - there is absolutely no finesse, and that is critical for driving fast.
Lastly: "For example, the math involved in getting a spinning wheel to grip the pavement is very similar to recovering from a slide on a patch of ice. "If we can figure out how to get Shelley out of trouble on a race track, we can get out of trouble on ice," Gerdes said."
Haha, no. Pavement, ice, dirt, and snow all have very different characteristics and "getting out of trouble" on them is different. Effin' Californians... Spend a winter in Vermont, then tell me about how to drive on ice.
Please help metamoderate.
was european driving tourists coming over and assuming the higways were autobahn quality (not even close) and dying after flying off a bump. Montana realized that their highways weren't safe above 85 and posted it.
to a visually spectactular, high speed, failure and breakup of a driverless car. One way they will react is to play the footage over and over, that's for sure.
what about the courts will the coders have to give testimonies and can they be a risk of going to prison due to poor coding that leads to some one dieing?
Well, Stanford wins on car choice, at least.
"Reasonable and Prudent" was nixed when someone was given a speeding ticket and challenged it in court. The court held that "reasonable and prudent" was arbitrary and what one police officer thought was "reasonable and prudent" was not necessarily what another officer would think and that there was no way for a citizen to feel confident that they were within the bounds of the law. (I.e., What if you had gone through advanced drivers training??? Does that mean you can go faster?)
Along these lines, I'm waiting for someone to challenge the catch all charge "Disorderly Conduct" which you can be nabbed for just walking down the street at the wrong time and thousands of innocent people get caught in this catch all charge annually.
The main advantage of computer driven cars is that they learn faster than humans. A human is at a massive learning disadvantage as he can't exactly replicate his actions, recall his sensory input perfectly, vary aspects of his driving without affecting other aspects nor make changes that are smaller than his biologically imposed resolution limit. The computer can learn more from every previous race and try more things in the search for lower lap times. After sufficient versions/updates (and assuming a sporting governing body doesn't implement blocking rules) the AI's ability will exceed the upper limit imposed by the biology of the driver.
I can't see any other way this could possible work out.
I call it "THE BRICK" !
topping 120 miles per hour on straightaways
Enquiring minds want to know how fast it took the bendaroonies.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm posting anon and being vague so I don't get anyone in trouble, but a former colleague once took an autonomous car to 100 mph on a straightaway. This was around the turn of the century, not on a race track, and the vehicle was definitely -not- a sports car. The data trace was presented in m/s so the non-engineers in the room wouldn't realize how fast he went.
A 2:30 seems like a terrible time to me. I did a 2:40.312 in an old Festiva with a busted engine and severely compromised rear suspension on janky old street tires.