Scientists at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) have redesigned an Audi TTS with computers and global positioning system (GPS) receivers so that the car can drive itself. The car will attempt to scale Pikes Peak without a driver at race speeds following a GPS trail from start to finish. “Our first goal is to go up Pikes Peak at speeds resembling race speeds, keep the car stable around corners, and have everything work the way we want it to,” says Stanford’s Chris Gerdes. The car has reached speeds of 130 miles per hour without a driver during test runs at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It uses differential GPS, which corrects for interference in the atmosphere, and can locate the car’s position on Earth within about two centimeters. The car measures its speed and acceleration with wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer, and also employs gyroscopes to control equilibrium and direction. “The computer puts all this information together and then compares it to a digital map to figure out how close the car is to the path that we want it to take up Pikes Peak,” Gerdes says.
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