Autoblog

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

That type of belligerence might be coming to your car under the guise of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Many cars can already be had with the necessary hardware like GPS navigation systems that help a vehicle determine its position, and stability control that can already fire individual brakes to effect course corrections. Is the next step writing the software to interconnect those systems into an active safety net? This would effectively enable the car to steer you out of trouble if it compares your trajectory with the nav system and determines you're off-course.

Passive safety systems have seemingly hit a wall, and the mass that all that crash safety adds must be either offset through the use of more exotic and expensive materials, or the result is a stupendously heavy vehicle. The next step will be active safety, a baby-step that has already been made with stability control and active cruise control. Current maps in navigation systems aren't adequate for driver aids, as they're mainly bird's-eye-view positional representations. Once maps with more data become available, the possibility of your car bringing all its situational awareness equipment to bear so that it can execute lane changes and warn you about a blind hairpin curve coming up might not be such fantasy.

[Source: Automotive Design Line]

Named in honor of Herbie the Love Bug, the famous number 53, Volkswagen's GTI '53+1' is car that requires no human nanny. It's a fully automatic car that can negotiate twists, turns and straights at the edge of its performance envelope, all without the aid of a driver's touch. The '53+1' uses radar and laser sensors as electronic eyes, much like many of the entrants in the DARPA Grand Challenge, to read the road ahead, and a satellite navigation system to pinpoint its position to within an inch.

The '53+1' was let loose on a race circuit and reportedly can reach its top speed of 150 mph with no driver on board. To prove the system's abilities, Volkswagen allowed guests at an event to design different road courses using cones and then watched as the driverless GTI ran through them. It even ran through courses faster than the company's own engineers could manage.

While the linked article is sparse on the down-and-dirty details of how the system works, it appears that it's set up to recognize only cones, or at least simple objects on an uncluttered road course. Still, the next DARPA challenge takes place in an urban setting and Stanford, winners of the last challenge with an autonomous Touareg, are planning to use a Passat this time around. If these two ever team up, in the near future we'll be able to order a Rabbit with a Twincharger engine, DSG and Auto Pilot. Now that's innovation.

[Source: Daily Mail]

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...]