Self-Driving Car Faces Off Against Pro On Thunderhill Racetrack

Hugh Pickens writes "Rachel Swaby reports that a self-driving car and a seasoned race-car driver recently faced off at Northern California's three-mile Thunderhill Raceway loop. The autonomous vehicle is a creation from the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). 'We tried to model [the self-driving car] after what we've learned from the best race-car drivers,' says Chris Gerdes (who talks more about the development of autonomous cars in this TED talk). So who won? Humans, of course. But only by a few measly seconds. 'What the human drivers do is consistently feel out the limits of the car and push it just a little bit farther,' explained Gerdes. 'When you look at what the car is capable of and what humans achieve, that gap is really actually small.' Because the self-driving car reacts to the track as if it were controlled in real time by a human, a funny thing happens to passengers along for the ride. Initially, when the car accelerates to 115 miles per hour and then brakes just in time to make it around a curve, the person riding shotgun freaks out. But a second lap looks very different. Passengers tend to relax, putting their faith in the automatically spinning wheel. 'We might have a tendency to put too much confidence in it,' cautioned Gerdes. 'Watching people experience it, they'll say, oh, that was flawless.' Gerdes reaction: 'Wait wait! This was developed by a crazy professor and graduate students!'"

Comments

Seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconds aren't "measly" in motorsports. They can decide an entire season championship.

Re:Seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar to ABS, this has potential for saving John Driver's butt when he gets in over his head.

Firstly, if all robot cars can successfully drive at the limit of performance, avoidable accidents will cease to occur. Race drivers might be able to dodge a spinning car or deer in the blink of an eye, but John Driver can't.

Secondly, taking a page right out of ABS's playbook, one of the places human drivers have the most difficulty is variable or unusual conditions, like rain or loose surface (gravel, dirt, etc). Robots, as ABS has proved, are quite valuable in this sort of situation. While they cannot perform at the absolute limit, they can consistently perform close to that limit, while even the most skilled humans can have difficulty performing at the peak in variable or unusual conditions. Rally drivers may do it for a career, but John Driver isn't a rally driver.

Re:It will win soon

[OzPeter]

Kinda misses the point of a car. Perhaps not a tractor-trailer, but cars are definitely not all that useful without passengers.

Yes they are.

• Self driving car drops me off at the front door of where I want to be, and the drives itself off to an automated parking garage
• Self driving car starts up and drives to the local mechanic for its regular service in the middle of the day when I am working
• Tell self driving car to head to the local big box store and wait in the loading bay until it receives the latest toy that I ordered online

Re:ONLY a few seconds?

[viperidaenz]

Software also undergoes thousands of hours of testing before being set loose on the road. Human drivers, not so much.

Re:ONLY a few seconds?

[im_thatoneguy]

For every one of them that drives off a cliff, it'll save 100 people who would have not noticed a stopped vehicle ahead while checking over their shoulder while merging or running a red light because were momentarily distracted, or looked down to check the stereo for a second and drifted into oncoming traffic.

Re:BRAKE

[David_Hart]

In the context of the article, the word used to decelerate when coming into a corner should be "brake" not "break". The traditional use of the word "break" indicates that the car has become "broken" or is damaged in some way.

While it's true that the saying "make a break for it" indicates taking off in a different direction, there is no connotation of slowing down. In fact, it has the opposite connotation of picking up speed. In the case of cornering, you have to slow the vehicle down or centrifugal force will cause the vehicle to leave the road.

In this case you would BRAKE going into a corner and you then MAKE A BREAK out of the corner (i.e. quickly picking up speed to try to gain an advantage).