Shelley The Self-Driving Audi Is Faster Than You Are

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

The already fragile egos of HPDE drivers are about to take another hit. Shelley, the autonomous Audi TT-S developed by Stanford, has tried her first lapping day, and the results were promising.

Shelley is capable of lapping in Thunderhill in well under two and a half minutes, which won’t win her any SCCA trophies. According to the article at Singularity Hub, however, she’s within a few seconds of “professional drivers” already. The exact laptimes aren’t available, so it’s impossible to know if she is running 2:29 or 2:14.

The Stanford people say that Shelley is particularly good at judging corner entry speed — which is interesting because that’s exactly the task that most novice track drivers get very wrong. In fact, you can argue that accurate corner estimation is the single most important task a racer faces.

Watching the very short snippets of in-car video is interesting because you can clearly see the car working the wheel back and forth mid-corner to find out the available grip. This little rocking motion is common to racing drivers everywhere, particularly in wet conditions. Note, too, that the Audi’s nose doesn’t change direction when this happens; that’s because, as I’ve shown my students many harrowing times, when you’re already at the right speed for the corner, turning the steering wheel more accomplishes nothing.

Shelley’s now run Pikes Peak and Thunderhill. If she can just make it down to Pebble Beach next year, she’ll have accomplished more than pretty much every working motoring journo in the business. Thank G-d she can’t write.

Yet.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Djoelt1 Djoelt1 on Aug 22, 2012

    Fabulous track. I was just lapping there on Sunday. I'm curious what the lap times were. Anyone with some practice can do 90% of the car's maximum capability: If the car is capable of a 2:10 lap, that's 2:24:4 for the anyone. The line looked pretty good except the video kept cutting out the exit phase so it wasn't possible to tell if they were really using all the track. If I had the self drive feature in my own car it would certainly help me improve my own lap times. Imagine the car driving itself, acquiring acceleration/speed/path data while doing so, then comparing it to the data you generate yourself. It would be immediately clear where you needed to improve. I do wonder if the car figured out the best path or just copying what an experienced driver did earlier.

    • See 1 previous
    • Orenwolf Orenwolf on Aug 22, 2012

      @bludragon Actually, from their press release, it sounds like it very well may be correcting: "For example, the math involved in getting a spinning wheel to grip the pavement is very similar to recovering from a slide on a patch of ice. "If we can figure out how to get Shelley out of trouble on a race track, we can get out of trouble on ice," Gerdes said." It sounds like if nothing else, the *intention* is to allow her to know what to do when she reaches the limit of grip.

  • 01 ZX3 01 ZX3 on Aug 22, 2012

    No thank you, I love driving too much to relinquish control to a computer.

  • TonyJZX TonyJZX on Aug 23, 2012

    this is really just an advanced chess board its been well established that computer chess programs cam now beat 99.999999% of all human players (has issues with certain Russian dissidents) of course you can program a car to excel at one track its an advanced rat maze if you will, its only 3 mile track or whatever it is

  • BrentNelson BrentNelson on Aug 23, 2012

    nice !!! Automatic cars will be take place of manual drivers cars in future. Automatic cars are designed with all safety precautions , so it will have near 0% chances of accidents . sometime because of human errors or mistakes made accidents . To avoid this We can use this cars . I will but one. Shelly is really great automatic car as we are seeing in this video . Thanks for sharing this great post!!!

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