drive

Delphi sets a new record with 5471 km autonomous drive

April 06, 2015

The Delphi Drive Automated Driving Vehicle journeyed from San Francisco to New York. The coast-to-coast journey covered 5471 km and 15 states. — AFP pic, April 6, 2015.A tech company that up until now has largely been known only in the automotive industry has just completed the longest automated drive ever attempted in North America.

On March 22, a specially adapted Audi SQ5 departed from San Francisco on route to New York - a 3,400-mile (about 5471 km) journey.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about that, but this car, which was packed full of radar sensors, cameras and microprocessors developed by a company called Delphi, managed to cover 99% of that route autonomously.

Delphi, a UK-headquartered global automotive technology company and one that already develops components for use in autonomous driving systems, wanted to test the breadth of its expertise in very different road-going situations.

"This drive will help us collect invaluable data in our quest to deliver the best automotive grade technologies on the market," said Jeff Owens, Delphi's chief technology officer before embarking on the road trip. "It's time to put our vehicle to the ultimate test by broadening the range of driving conditions."

The talk surrounding the future of autonomous driving and the strides being made by car companies is getting louder by the month.

On Thursday at the New York Auto Show, Nissan's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, pledged that self-driving cars would be hitting the streets of Japan by the end of 2016 and that by the end of the decade they would be able to navigate both highways and busy urban roads autonomously.

With this in mind, it's hard to believe that Delphi's road trip is the first coast-to-coast trip of its kind in history and the longest single autonomous journey performed on US roads.

The nine-day trip crossed 15 states and the District of Columbia and, as hoped, brought the tricked-out SQ5 into a number of potentially challenging and complex driving situations — including bad weather, road rage and detours due to construction work — situations a human driver can process instantaneously but that a computer system may struggle to understand.

In total six experts from Delphi made the trip, some inside the Audi and others following in a second car that collected and processed the data generated by the sensors and systems doing the autonomous driving. The trip generated over 2 Terabytes of data about the car's capabilities, which include automated parking, piloted highway driving, lane change and exiting and piloted urban driving.

"Our vehicle performed remarkably well during this drive, exceeding our expectations," said Owens. "The knowledge obtained from this trip will help optimise our existing active safety products and accelerate our future product development." — AFP/Relaxnews, April 6, 2015.