A look at high-speed autonomous driving

>> In over the last decade, we've been showing Real Time Java going to more and more demanding environments, culminating in the industrial robots and industrial controllers we've had on stage here. But they've been sort of removed from the everyday experience and that's why I was really, really excited about project Bixby so we have some slides. So we're actually going to automate on Audi TTS, completely no human intervention to drive at really high speeds around a rally course using a GPS defined rally course and it's going to go to fast.

>> So this is the Urban Grand Challenge with the wheels unstuck from the pavement the whole time...

>> Exactly, exactly. So in the next slide we have the teams that are participating in this. So the Volkswagen Engineering Research Lab here in Palo Alto they're actually building and instrumenting the Audi. Of course it's drive by wires so there we're kind of injecting ourselves into the drive by wire system and that's part of the deal as well as what they're doing is developing the safety strategy. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Remember this car is going to be going 160 kph so without a driver so safety is crucial. At Stanford, the Volkswagen Automotive innovation lab is developing the control algorithms for the vehicle, so they've got, they've got the part that they're using that lab and trying to figure out, you know, how do we control this vehicle and get it to do the thing we want to do which is follow the GPS points and make it around the course and not hurt the bystanders. And Sun, our part in this is that we're going to provide the Solaris and Real Time Java a platform on which the control algorithms will execute and we'll be helping them in doing a few other things. So we have a video now of the GTI that's sort of the previous version, with the driver and the driver is there because well, the platform that they're using, they don't trust that's why they came to us.

>> Right.

Pause

>> Right, one of the interesting things about Java is all the stuff about fault handling, fault containment, fault isolation, that is just pretty unique, I mean something that Java developers don't usually think about, but, when things go wrong, they don't go spectacularly wrong. Right, we can, we can recover.

>> So this is skeptically where we end up running our vehicles as a large skid pad with lots of run off room we've got them on pavement so that we know exactly how it's going to behave, what's going to happen and Volkswagen's been involved with autonomous and automatic vehicles for a long time and we've got here history of them starting with some steering robots as far as back as 2000 that were used for testing driver assistance systems and those things culminating on the GTI, which you saw, which was doing kind of only was able to beaten by formula 1 drivers and the like and at the same time we've got all of the work that we've been doing on the Grand Challenge and the Urban Challenge where we partnered with Stanford to build those vehicles and sort of taking those things together into project Bixby where we want to be doing things on dirt courses where the unexpected things are going to happen with the trail unexpected things are going to happen when the vehicle spins out at a turn and we want to be able to control it and the big thing is we don't really want to have a driver in the car for the safety of the tester and so we're going to pull that out and everything has to rely on the Java real time path. We want to show you guys a little bit of a sneak preview of what we'll have in October on the next video. These are the algorithms that are being developed by the Dynamics Design Lab at Stanford and this is their prototype vehicle. Right now we're working on taking all of this code and beginning to run it on our Audi TTS.

>> Right, so in this platform the code is pretty fragile, has timing issues...

>> Oh yeah.

>> Yeah, yada, yada.

>> Yeah, if it goes over, if it runs a little bit slow on one side the whole vehicle will freeze and they have to step on the brakes and try to wrestle it back in control and...

>> Right.

>> Not so good.

>> Right. So, so, so your vision for this isn't, I mean, I mean this looks like pure unadulterated fun, but you can actually do something useful with this right, I mean...

>> Exactly. So on the more useful side of things, we can use this for testing the stability control in the ABS systems by being able to do repeatable passes of the vehicle kind of on the edges of control and being able to bring it back in and we also can develop a little bit more experience to be able to eventually get to the red button that says take me home on the car.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====