Robot are on course to challenge the most skilled of human drivers.

It’s a trecherous course with more than 12 miles of breakneck turns on dusty mountain roads 14,000 feet high. Pike’s Peak is one of the oldest, most impressive, and difficult races in the US, and it was just conquered by a robot. Stanford University, along with the VW Electronics Research Lab, and Oracle built an autonomous Audi TTS that could race up the peak without a human driver. Though only recently announced, the robot car made its historic run in September, just a few months after human racers competed in the 88th annual Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb. We homo sapiens still outperform our robotic creations -the top times for Pike’s Peak are near 10 minutes, while the autonomous Audi TTS took 27. But don’t rest easy my fellow humans. Robot cars have started to challenge our most extreme courses, and they’ll only get better in the future. Watch clips from the historical Pike’s Peak run in the video below. Seventeen minutes seems like a mighty slim buffer right about now.

As we covered before, Stanford’s Volkswagon Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL) has been preparing for this run for about a year. While previous ventures into robot cars have concentrated on safe driving, the Pike’s Peak run is all about pushing the needle into the red. They don’t simply want to drive up the mountain, they want to drive fast. Really fast. Even in the most treacherous stretches of the course, the autonomous Audi TTS was still pushing 45 mph. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t play it that fast and loose when I’m on a dirt road on the back side of the mountain. Just watching the driverless Audi climb those hills gives me goosebumps. It may not be able to challenge the best among us, but this robotic car is probably getting close to my level at least.

Even though the Audi performed all its own maneuvers this race was still in controlled conditions. Members of the PPIHC were on hand to certify the car’s time for the course. According to the press release, local and state traffic officials made certain that the test could be run with the utmost regard for safety. Outside observers were kept to a minimum, and as you can see in the video, a manned car followed the Audi on its run. In that regard, this trial wasn’t all that different than the DARPA Urban Challenge, or the recent miles logged by Google’s autonomous cars. We have a highly trained robot car, but we keep it on a very short leash.

Yet even with that leash the Pike’s Peak run represents something new in autonomous driving. We’re not simply looking at a system that can perform hairpin maneuvers under strict conditions, we’re looking at a system that is challenging human supremacy on the road. It’s not just about whether we could have robot cars, it’s about whether those cars would be better drivers than we are under any circumstance. The answer for now, is no.

But how quickly will that change? Over their entire lives human drivers improve their skills, but as a whole the Pike’s Peak  record only comes down a few seconds at a time. Autonomous cars have the potential to rapidly improve themselves, and to keep improving over time. At 27 minutes, the autonomous Audi is probably better than many human drivers. Every minute it shaves off its record it will overcome millions of drivers in skill. At some point in the future, there will be few, if any humans that will be able to match these cars. The gauntlet has been thrown down and robot cars are a potent challenger.

Yet when they defeat us, we will also win. Imagine a world where we have widespread autonomous vehicles, and where each of those autos has the capabilities that exceed the most experienced rally car drivers. Not only could you let your robot automobile drive for you, you could rest easy knowing that it will dodge hazards, brake for children in the road, and speed down the highway with a grace you could not produce on your own. When we can produce a robot car that can win at Pike’s Peak the whole world should rejoice, because the whole world could be made much safer.

I fear, however, that it will take much longer for us to accept these cars on the road than it will for them to master it. As I mentioned when discussing Google’s foray into autonomous vehicles, legal and social issues surrounding robot cars are likely to retard their adoption considerably. Even expert rally car drivers crash occasionally. Until we can psychologically accept our machines routinely killing innocent bystanders we will not be able to trade the millions of traffic deaths in our current world for the thousands of deaths we would have in a world with automated roads.

Automotive perfection seems closer every day, but we have to keep in mind that it will take time and global effort for it to arrive. For now we can simply enjoy watching an empty car racing up Pike’s Peak. This is just a first step towards something better. The future is going to be so cool.

[screen capture and video credit: Audi of America]
[source: AudiUSA]

Stanford's driverless Audi TTS will race up Pike's Peak this year.

Hitting high speeds will be a departure from what the Stanford team had to do in the past. Stanley never got above 38 mph in the desert, and high speeds were not an option in the Urban challenge. Instead, the challenges in those competitions mainly involved interpreting the information from the environment around the car. Going up Pike’s Peak will test the robotic car’s ability to interpret the information coming from the car itself, such as how its tires are gripping the road as it drifts through a turn.

Audi has already made progress in this area, setting an unofficial automated driving speed record of 130 mph. They also managed to get the car to do the pretty hard core maneuvering seen in the following video:

If they can perfect this, and actually race up the length of Pike’s Peak using rally driving techniques, it will be the closest anyone has yet come in developing a robot driver with a “feel” for the road.

Ostensibly, Stanford and VW are teaming up on this project to get experience pushing automated drive-by-wire techniques to their limit. This will help future computers to understand, in the split second before an accident, what maneuvers are in the range of possibility to avoid a collision. Personally however, I think they are doing it for a far more important reason- it’s just so damn cool.

Although we will faithfully report when a car can drive into a parking lot and park itself, a robot car kicking up dust clouds as it burns its way up Pike’s Peak is the kind of thing that makes the evening news. More coverage could alert people to how much progress we’ve made, in a world with adaptive cruise control and lane assist, towards realizing the dream of a self-driving car. It might also spark a robot competition to run the course in yet faster times. This would be great for two reasons. First, it might eventually give driving AI a “Deep Blue” moment if a team could beat the best human time for the racetrack. Second, with multiple teams pushing the limits on their way to the top, it would inevitably lead to spectacular crashes as cars fly off the thousand foot cliffs that line the course. All the fun of car wrecks without any of the guilt. All the while, of course, the fine-tuning of robotic driving would bring us closer to a world with no car wrecks at all.

Robotic drivers? Don't quit your day job, Speed.

[screen capture and video credit: BotJunkie]

No humans here. This Passat is parking itself.

Sure you could drive your own car and park it yourself, but why go to all that trouble when computer and robots can do it for you? The Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) and Stanford’s robotic car team recently debuted a Passat that can park itself. The autonomous valet parking project used only moderate modifications to allow the VW sedan to find the first available space in a lot and park itself without any human guidance. Check out the video of the October 24th demonstration from BotJunkie after the break.

Stanford’s no newcomer to robotic vehicles. They’ve placed and won the DARPA Urban Challenge with Stanley and Junior. They’ve also modified a Audi TTS named Shelley that will soon be sent out to climb Pike’s Peak on its own. The autonomous valet parking is just one aspect of a greater effort to create fully autonomous vehicles. As object recognition software improves, and decision making capabilities are refined, cars will become capable of increasingly complex driving routines. The prize money offered in the Urban Challenge ($2 million USD) is undoubtedly fueling some of the interest, but you have to think that at some level researchers are just excited about creating robotic cars.

Impressively, the Passat from the autonomous valet parking project contains mostly stock parts. The vehicle uses a camera placed in front of the rear view mirror and a front radar system which can be purchased as package options from Volkswagen. Small lasers sensors were added along the periphery but a similar LIDAR system is also available from VW. Of course, robotic controls and a huge computer system don’t come standard in a Passat, but the fact remains that the self-parking car isn’t that far from a vehicle you could purchase right now at any Volkswagen dealership.

Yet, if the vehicle is almost road ready, the programming is still stuck in the underground garage. The VAIL/Stanford car can park itself, but only if provided with a map of the lot before hand. Also, if you have children, pets, or elderly loved ones who like hanging out on asphalt, now’s the time to get them to safety. The robotic car is unable to avoid obstacles and will not stop if encounters one. Admittedly, the engineering team has slated obstacle recognition as the next step in the project, but I have a great deal more respect for those courageous enough to hang out in the parking lot during the demonstration.

So the machine’s a deadly robot on wheels for now, but that’s going to change. With prizes like the DARPA Urban Challenge and the support of a major automotive manufacturing like Volkswagen, it’s only a matter of time before Stanford makes marked improvements in the autonomy of its robotic cars. And let’s not forget that there are dozens of other teams pursuing the same goal. It’s taken many decades to reach the level of independence demonstrated by the autonomous valet parking system, but it may not take decades more to produce a vehicle that can drive as well as a human. We’ve already got planes that can land themselves, hopefully we’ll soon have cars that can auto-park without hitting your kids.

[screen capture and video credit: BotJunkie]