Engineers from Stanford University have marked Back to the Future day by releasing footage of MARTY, a self-driving, electric DeLorean.
Developed as part of research into ways autonomous vehicles can be equipped to handle even the most dangerous and dramatic of driving situations, MARTY, short for Multiple Actuator Research Testbed for Yaw control, looks at how autonomous vehicles can trade stability for fluid driving.
Most modern cars, including self-driving models, use Electronic Stability Control (ESC) to keep their handling stable by, for example, automatically applying brakes or even cutting engine power to improve stability in risky situations. However, Stanford Professor Chris Gerdes said that "in our work developing autonomous driving algorithms, we've found that sometimes you need to sacrifice stability to turn sharply and avoid accidents".
MARTY has been created to act without such stability controls and instead mimic rally car drivers by "sacrificing stability [to] use all of the car's capabilities to avoid obstacles and negotiate tight turns at speed". By doing this, the team hopes to create self-driving systems that can control a car safely in any situation.
MARTY has been created to act without such stability controls and instead mimic rally car drivers by "sacrificing stability [to] use all of the car's capabilities to avoid obstacles and negotiate tight turns at speed". By doing this, the team hopes to create self-driving systems that can control a car safely in any situation.
In addition to its automated driving capabilities, MARTY has been upgraded with an electric supercar engine made by Renovo. The engine delivers 4,000 pound-feet from on-motor gearboxes to the rear wheels in a fraction of a second, giving MARTY the kind of precise control required for manoeuvres such as drifting.
MARTY can already drift in perfect circles, but that's only the beginning. The team hopes the self-driving car will ultimately be able to participate in a drifting competition with a human driver, where two vehicles compete to match and better each other's stunts while avoiding collisions.
"A drift competition is the perfect blend of our two most important research questions -- how to control the car precisely and how to design automated vehicles that interact with humans," Gerdes said.
Mechanical engineer Jonathan Goh, who designed MARTY's drifting capabilities, summed up the project by saying that "the sublime awesomeness of riding in a DeLorean that does perfect, smoke-filled doughnuts by itself is a mind-bending experience that helps you appreciate that we really are living in the future".
21 October 2015 is Back to the Future Day, the date that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel forward to in the 1989 film Back to the Future II. People who grew up in the '80s -- particularly those who work in marketing -- are very excited about this.
By K.G. Orphanides
With many thanks to Wired UK
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