Researchers at Stanford University in California are moving faster with the first self-driving race car.
Self-driving cars have been in the news lately, particularly the Google cars, navigating busy streets and parking themselves. Now comes the newest iteration of the autonomous car line, an auto piloted race car.
Engineers from Stanford University have created an self propelled Audi TT-S which can reach speeds of up to 120 miles per hour.
The car, named Shelly, recently raced to prove itself at the Thunderhill Raceway in California just barely losing to a rival human driver. The impressive project doesn’t have any plans to replace any Formula 1 or Indy car drivers just yet, but do want to learn from professional drivers how to make future cars more capable and safe.
Professor Chris Gerdes, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford explained that he used actual race car drivers to build the algorithms that drive the robot car. Using advanced neuro-monitoring technology, the professor placed electrodes on the scalps of drivers and monitored which sections of their brains fired as they performed different driving maneuvers.
Combining these results with GPS, inertial sensors, and finely tuned robotics created the robo-car that could constantly adapt to conditions while making the decisions necessary to move faster. The car can process nearly all of the same data a driver sees and make choices that are almost as good has it’s human counterparts.
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