Stanford University.
Today we're here at Thunderhill.
It's a great place to
test a lot of things
that you wouldn't be able to
do on a normal public road.
We're really exploring
autonomous vehicle control,
right up to the limits
of what these cars are
capable of doing.
We're using x1, which is
a completely student built
vehicle test bed platform.
And we are running
it autonomously
around an oval track
on the skid pad.
At the edge of one
of the tight turns,
the vehicle is operating at the
edge of its vehicle handling
limits.
And then an obstacle
will pop up,
and the vehicle has to
adjust its trajectory.
What we built was our
own sort of airbag,
by using plastic tablecloth
and sewing it into a tube.
And we use a leaf
blower and place
the tube across the entire
lane, making the car be
forced to make a lane change.
What we're really
trying to test here
is a control algorithm
that can balance
a lot of very challenging
things that crop up
when a car has to approach
its physical capabilities.
This controller is trying
to not hit the obstacle,
but it's also trying
not to spin out.
Of lesser priority is
trying to do this smoothly,
so that and occupant
isn't jerked around.
And so there's a lot of
conflicting objectives
that have to be met.
The car is making all
these decisions itself.
It goes into a turn
and it's trying
to use all the available grip.
If it starts sliding, it can
recognize that it's sliding
and try and recover from that.
And the hope is that if we
can figure these things out
in a controlled research
environment like this,
we can extend those ideas
to production vehicles that
may have autonomous
capabilities in the future.
If a car is physically
capable of avoiding something,
we'd like to develop
the controllers that
make that happen.
For more, please visit
us at stanford.edu.
