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.

Comments

actually is less surprising to me than Google's

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:actually is less surprising to me than Google's

[hey!]

And I expect computers on the road will get better the higher percentage of computer-driven cars there are on the road. The reasons is that people are very good at predicting the behavior of other people. Just the other day I was driving on the interstate in moderate, fast moving traffic and I saw a guy pull up behind a car in the right lane. "Watch this guy," I said to my wife, and sure enough he changed lanes, pulled up to within two feet of the car in front of me (at 70 mph) and cut in front of the first car with hardly a foot to spare. It was exactly what I'd expected him to do, based on the speed with he approached and the kind of car he was driving.

Of course a lot of predictive heuristics about human behavior could be programmed into an automated system. One of them might be recognizing the slow reactions of distracted drivers. As I approach intersections these days I'm always on the lookout for someone on the cross street who is not slowing as soon as he should. Frequently these are drivers on cell phones who not only miss the stop line, but end up well into the intersection before they start looking for traffic.

A robotic driver would be consistently aware and prudent. I suspect well before the point where a robot driver is as good as an average driver (if we aren't there already), we'd reach the point where the roads would be safer if all cars were robot piloted, simply by removing human inconsistency.

Please put a second car on the track

[Maxo-Texas]

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?

Not to take away too much, but...

[spagthorpe]

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.

Re:Not to take away too much, but...

[Krneki]

First learn to walk, then you learn how to run.

For AI is the same, don't worry soon it will outrun, outpace, ... and make you completely useless. But it's ok.

On car topic: I can't wait for this to be a safety feature, Imagine, you drive full throttle down the road, but you miss-judged a corner, the AI, with light-speed reaction time understand that you can't make it at that speed and applies the little correction you need to make it through. It's the same, with traction-control, ABS, ... this will just be the next logical step.