Autoblog

Hybrid vehicles have always offered more benefits to the zip-around-town Domino's pizza delivery boy than the long-distance highway commuter. In fact, without regernative braking at work, a hybrid vehicle at highway speeds exhibits very few efficiency advantages over a frugal MINI Cooper.

Addressing one of the problems, Honda is now touting a "heat-harnessing hybrid", claiming it can recapture energy that most conventional hybrids lose during high speed driving. Greatly simplified, the innovative approach uses exhaust heat to convert water to steam. The steam turns an electric generator that then charges the vehicle's battery pack. It's all based on an age-old principle called the "Rankine cycle." Pre-boomers may recall it's the same type of technology that was used in the Stanley Steamer a century ago.

Honda crammed all of the "heat-harnessing" plumbing into a Honda Stream prototype and captured three times as much energy as a regenerative braking system on the EPA highway cycle. While that may sound impressive, the technology still needs to come a long way and the price fall before we find steam generators in our cars. Thanks to Sylvester for the tip!

[Source: ecogeek]

Stanford won the first ever DARPA Challenge -- a test of skill and endurance for autonomous vehicles -- in 2005 with a VW Passat wagon called Stanley. This year it came in second with a VW Passat Wagon called Stanley, Jr. Though the university didn't win the Challenge this year, it did win with VW, which has pledged $5.75 million over five years to fund VAIL: the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory at Stanford.

VAIL will house Stanford's CarLab, a research and teaching program that aims to "radically rethink the automobile in order to deliver unprecedented levels of safety and driver and passenger enjoyment." VW's own engineers will work with CarLab, as well as other academic groups housed at VAIL that explore computer science and electrical engineering, a mechanical engineering group working on cleaner engines and advanced dynamic control, and a communications group that is studying the "psychology of making cars safer and more enjoyable."

[Source: VW]

We had the pleasure of catching Dr. Sebastian Thrun's keynote presentation at the 2006 Sensors Expo on Tuesday, where he spoke to the audience about his experience leading Stanford's DARPA Challenge entry to victory last year and how the project's success may affect the way we drive in the not-so-distant future.

The technical content of "Stanley" is fascinating, of course. Due to the relative inaccuracy of GPS (2 meters of error doesn't cut it on a 2.5-meter-wide mountain pass), a variety of sensors were used for environmental recognition, allowing the vehicle to discern "good" terrain from non-drivable areas. A array of five lasers scan the area in front of the vehicle for obstacles, and their downward trajectory combines with the forward movement of the vehicle to allow for the return of 3D data. Unfortunately, the 20 meter range of the lasers and the 70 Hz scan rate limits the maximum practical speed of the vehicle to 35 MPH or so when relying solely on this navigational device.

To allow the faster travel speeds thought necessary to secure a victory, an optical camera was implemented to learn from the laser system how drivable terrain appears, eventually allowing the vehicle to see much further down the intended path and thus facilitating higher speeds. Doing so isn't as easy as it may seem - color can't be used due to the wide variety in coloration of drivable surfaces (roads may be brown, black, red, tan, or any number of other shades), and texture detection is nearly worthless as Thrun noted that the sky is smoothly textured but yet not a practical path. Radar is also used to provide ranging information.

[Click through for much more on this vehicle and the future of (not) driving...]

 

We all know the basic facts about the DARPA Grand Challenge that pitted over 20 autonomous vehicles against each other and the elements out in the Mojave Desert last October. After watching the NOVA special The Great Robot Race on PBS last night the entire enterprise has taken on a whole new dynamic thanks to the excellent backstory provided by the program that reaches all the way back to the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004.

While The Great Robot Race features background on many contenders, including a “nobody” darkhorse team from New Orleans that finished fourth overall just weeks after Katrina blew through its hometown, the main push of the program centers around the two teams from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. Sebastian Thrun heads the Stanford team, which is actually comprised of Carnegie Mellon defectors including Thrun himself, and they enter Stanley, a Touareg donated by Volkswagen, in the contest. Red Whittaker, an ex-marine turned college prof who presides over an army of graduate students and a pair of autonomous H1 Hummers named “H1ghlander” and “Sandstorm”, leads the Carnegie Mellon team.

Read on for more of the gritty details that led up to a showdown of these two teams in the desert.

Since ESPN passed on airing the DARPA Grand Challenge in its entirety last October, we’re grateful that PBS is picking up the slack. The esoterically excellent NOVA program will air “The Great Robot Race” tonight on PBS at 8PM EST, in which the winning VW Touareg named “Stanley” fielded by Stanford University will be showcased along with technological innovations from the other 22 contenders it creamed on its way to the crown.

Autoblog posted a bunch on the race as it was happening, most of which you can find here. Although you can bet our TiVo’s are set to tape tonight as we want to see what the future of motorsports looks like with our own eyes.

[Source: Volkswagen]