The future race car 150mph and no driver Chris Gerdes
so how many of you have ever gotten
behind the wheel of a car when you
really shouldn’t have been driving maybe
you’re out on the road for a long day
and you just wanted to get home
you’re tired but you felt you could
drive a few more miles maybe you thought
I’ve had less to drink than everybody
else I should be the one to go home or
maybe your mind was just entirely
elsewhere does this sound familiar to
you now in those situations wouldn’t it
be great if there was a button on your
dashboard that you could push and the
car would get you home safely now that’s
been the promise of the self-driving car
the autonomous vehicle and it’s been the
dream since at least 1939 when General
Motors showcased this idea their
Futurama booth at the World’s Fair now
it’s been one of those dreams that’s
always seemed about 20 years in the
future now two weeks ago that dream took
a step forward when the state of Nevada
granted Google’s self-driving car the
very first license for an autonomous
vehicle clearly establishing that it’s
legal for them to test it on the roads
in Nevada now California is considering
similar legislation and this would make
sure that the autonomous car is not one
of those things that has to stay in
Vegas
now in my lab at Stanford we’ve been
working on autonomous cars - but with a
slightly different spin on things you
see we’ve been developing robotic race
cars cars that can actually push
themselves to the very limits of
physical performance now why would we
want to do such a thing well there’s two
really good reasons for this first we
believe that before people turn over
control to an autonomous car that
autonomous car should be at least as
good as the very best human drivers now
if you’re like me and the other 70% of
the population who know that we are
above-average drivers you understand
that’s a very high bar there’s another
reason as well just like racecar drivers
can use all of the friction between the
tire in the road all of the cars
capabilities to go as fast as possible
we want to use all of those capabilities
to avoid any accident we can now you may
push the car to the limits not because
you’re driving too fast but because
you’ve hit an icy patch of road
conditions have changed in those
situations we want a car that is capable
enough to avoid any accident that can
physically be avoided I must confess
there’s kind of a third motivation as
well you see I have a passion for racing
in the past I’ve been a race car owner a
crew chief and a driving coach although
maybe not at the level that you’re
currently expecting one of the things
that we’ve developed in the lab we’ve
developed several vehicles is what we
believe is a world’s first autonomously
drifting car it’s another one of those
categories where maybe there’s not a lot
of competition
but this is p1 it’s an entirely
student-built
electric vehicle which through using its
rear-wheel drive and front wheel steer
by wire can drift around corners
it can get sideways like a rally car
driver always able to take the tightest
curve even on slippery unchanging
surfaces never spinning out we’ve also
worked with Volkswagen Oracle on Shelly
an autonomous race car that has raced at
a hundred and fifty miles an hour
through the Bonneville Salt Flats gone
around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the
Sun the wind and the rain and navigated
the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the
Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado
with nobody at the wheel
I guess it goes without saying that
we’ve had a lot of fun doing this but in
fact there’s something else that we’ve
developed in the process of developing
these autonomous cars we have developed
a tremendous appreciation for the
capabilities of human race car drivers
as we’ve looked at the question of how
well do these cars performed we wanted
to compare them to our human
counterparts and we discovered their
human counterparts are amazing now we
can take a map of a racetrack we could
take a mathematical model of a car and
with some iteration we can actually find
the fastest way around that track we
line that up with data that we record
from a professional driver and the
resemblance is absolutely remarkable yes
there are subtle differences here but
the human race car driver is able to go
out and drive an amazingly fast line
without the benefit of an algorithm that
compares the trade-off between going as
fast as possible in this corner and
shaving a little bit of time off of the
straight over here not only that they’re
able to do it
lap after lap after lap they’re able to
go out and consistently do this pushing
the car to the limits every single time
it’s extraordinary to watch you put them
in a new car and after a few laps they
found the fastest line in that car and
they’re off to the races it really makes
you think we’d love to know what’s going
on inside their brain so as researchers
that’s what we decided to find out we
decided to instrument not only the car
but also the race car driver to try to
get a glimpse into what was going on in
their head as they were doing this now
this is dr. Lena Harvick applying
electrodes to the head of john morton
john morton is a former can-am and EMSA
driver who’s also a class champion at
Lamar fantastic driver and very willing
to put up with graduate students and
this sort of research she’s putting
electrodes on his head so that we can
monitor the election
activity in John’s brain as he races
around the track now clearly we’re not
gonna put a couple of electrodes on his
head and understand exactly what all of
his thoughts are on the track
however neuroscientists have identified
certain patterns that let us tease out
some very important aspects of this for
instance the resting brain tends to
generate a lot of alpha waves
in contrast fatal waves are associated
with a lot of cognitive activity like
visual processing things where the
driver is is thinking quite a bit now we
can measure this and we can look at the
relative power between the theta waves
and the alpha waves this gives us a
measure of mental workload how much the
driver is actually challenged
cognitively at any point along the track
now we wanted to see if we could
actually record this on the track so we
headed down south to Laguna Seca we’re
gonna take as a legendary Raceway about
halfway between Salinas and Monterey it
has a curve there called the corkscrew
now the corkscrew is a chicane followed
by a quick right-handed turn as the road
drops three stories now the strategy for
driving this has explained to me was you
aim for the bush in the distance and as
the road falls away you realize it was
actually the top of the tree alright so
thanks to the revs program in Stanford
we were able to take John there and put
him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche
Abarth Carrera life is way too short for
boring cars so here you see John on the
track he’s going up the hill Oh somebody
like that and you can see actually his
mental workload measuring here in the
red bar you can see his actions as he
approaches now watch he has to downshift
and then he has to turn left look for
the tree and down not surprisingly you
can see this is a pretty challenging
task you can see his mental workload
spike as he goes through this as you
would expect with something that
requires this level of complexity but
what’s really interesting is to look at
areas to the track where his mental
workload doesn’t increase I’m gonna take
you around now to the other side of the
track turn 3 and John’s gonna go into
that corner of the rear end of the car
is going to begin to slide out he’s
gonna have to correct for that with
steering so watch as John does this here
watch the mental workload and watch the
steering the
car begins to slide out dramatic
maneuver to correct it and no change
whatsoever in the mental workload not a
challenging task in fact entirely
reflexive now our data processing on
this is still preliminary but it really
seems that these phenomenal feats that
the race car drivers are performing are
instinctive they are things that they
have simply learned to do it requires
very little mental workload for them to
perform these amazing feats and their
actions are fantastic this is exactly
what you want to do on the steering
wheel to catch the car in this situation
now this has given us tremendous insight
and inspiration for our own autonomous
vehicles we started to ask the question
can we make them a little less
algorithmic and a little more intuitive
can we take this reflexive action that
we see from the very best racecar
drivers introduce it to our cars and
maybe even into a system that could get
on your car in the future that would
take us a long step along the road to
autonomous vehicles that drive as well
as the best humans but it’s made us
think a little bit more deeply as well
do we want something more from our car
than to simply be a chauffeur do we want
our car to perhaps be a partner a coach
someone that can use their understanding
of the situation to help us reach our
potential can in fact the technology not
simply replace humans but allow us to
reach the level of reflex and intuition
that we’re all capable of so as we move
forward into this technological future I
want you to just pause and think of that
for a moment what is the ideal balance
of human and machine and as we think
about that
let’s take inspiration from the
absolutely amazing capabilities of the
human body and the human mind thank you