Volkswagen Partners With Stanford On New Intelligent Vehicle Lab
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Saturday, 24 of October , 2009 at 2:15 am
Stanford University has one of the most experienced, and successful, automotive research labs in the world. You may remember Stanley, the autonomous Volkswagen Touareg that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, as well as Junior, the autonomous Volkswagen Passat that was a runner up in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Apparently, Volkswagen Group is as impressed as everyone else has been, and, optimistic about the future of intelligence and autonomous vehicles, they’ve donated $2 million (plus research grants of $750k for 5 years) towards the construction and operation of a dedicated automotive innovation laboratory, VAIL (that would be, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory).
On Thursday, I met with Dr. Sven Beiker, the executive director of Stanford’s CarLab, and Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, the director of Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Lab in Palo Alto, to discuss some of the objectives of the new partnership. I asked them a few questions, starting with this one: if cars now have adaptive cruise control that keeps them from running into the car in front of them, as well as lane departure sensors that keep them from leaving their lane, how come I still have to pay attention when driving on the highway? The short answer is that the technologies aren’t quite refined enough yet, but the long answer isn’t a technical one, it’s a legal one: liability. Nobody has any idea what happens if something goes wrong and an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident, but companies are scared of it, which is why Panasonic, for example, isn’t producing its robot bed.
It’s issues like this that really define VAIL and make it different from other automotive research labs: at VAIL, they’re not just working on the cars themselves, they’re also working on everything that comes along with the development of intelligent cars: legal issues, social issues, business issues, even cultural issues… Not to mention more specific things like driver psychology. There’s a lot to consider, and that’s what they’re working on at VAIL. You know, besides all the car stuff. And there’s a lot of car stuff, too.
I also asked how Stanford was directing their research into autonomous vehicles now that there aren’t any more challenges from DARPA to provide a goal. The answer? More challenges! VAIL has identified three important areas of research, each of which has its own challenge:
Urban Environments
Challenge: drive from SF to LA, autonomously
User Interfaces
Challenge: design a one button interface that operates the entire vehicle
Up To The Limit
Challenge: race to the top of Pike’s Peak, autonomously
Sounds awfully exciting, and we’ll have more on that last one in a few hours… Stay tuned.
[Update: GetRobo has an interview with Stanford's Sebastian Thrun, where he provides some additional details on Urban Environments challenge to drive from downtown SF to downtown LA autonomously. Read it here.]
[ VAIL @ Stanford Press Release ]
Comments (30)
Category: Research
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Comment by Joey1058
Made Sunday, 1 of November , 2009 at 7:03 pm
Now they just need to partner with OnStar, and the Feds will have completed their complete domination of the American public.
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