CALIFORNIA: Now you can travel fast in self-driving cars as Watch Stanford’s vehicle has hit 120 mph on the racetrack.
Researchers at Stanford University have put several years of work into developing the autonomous car named Shelley in the hope of tapping into the functionality of race car driving, Daily Mail reported.
The team says doing this can help to make driving safer, and recent tests have proven the car can navigate a track nearly as fast as an experienced driver.
Student researchers led by Chris Gerdes, a professor of mechanical engineering, took Shelley to a 3-mile track at Thunderhill Raceway in Willows, California. The custom Audi TTS uses autonomous driving algorithms, and can surpass 110 miles per hour.
For the most part, however, Shelley operates between speeds of 50 and 75 mph.
Gerdes explains that this is around the speed at which most collisions occur, so understanding how Shelley performs under these conditions is important for development of collision avoidance software.
The team must examine how the car adjusts throttle, brakes, and uses the friction of its tires similar to how a race car driver would while operating at such speeds.
‘A race car driver can use all of a car’s functionality to drive fast,’ said Gerdes. ‘We want to access that same functionality to make driving safer.’
