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A 1965 Mustang sits in a queue waiting to ascend Goodwood Hill. Until now, so normal. As a passenger in the Stang, he is incredibly noisy thanks to his 289 CI V8, a 4.7-liter with 200hp and 282lb ft of torque, a sound synonymous with prancing horses at the time. Until now, so normal.
Behind the wheel, there is a driver. It is there that things become unusual. He's not a famous racing driver ready to push the Stang to its limits. Instead, he is Dr. James Brighton, head of advanced engineering at Cranfield University.
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Why? Well, this is not your typical sports car.
Now, it's fair to say that autonomous cars do not excite most people like most cars going up the hill. (Like the McLaren 600LT that we tried the other day.) But, the fact that the Duke of Richmond is making room for autonomous cars to run for the first time this year is marked. And, in many ways, a smart road, such as the Hill Hill Road, is perfect for improving self-driving cars.
So, what about this specific car? Well, it was developed by Cranfield University and Siemens and is making history this week as the first car to complete a standalone hillclimb at Goodwood.
It uses advanced location scanning technology to develop an accurate three-dimensional sweep of the way, alongside a plethora of sensors, algorithms, robots and control systems.
As he walks slowly in the queue, I try to forget the video that went viral two days earlier: the same car that rolls (softly) in a hay bale before correcting himself. I ask what happened. Brighton tells me that a hydraulic hose broke out on the steering system, one of the many woes to put an autonomous system in a classic car. They were up to 1am Thursday night trying to fix it "with keys," he told me.
Next to Brighton in the car, Kim Blackburn, a professor at Cranfield University, has two screens that display huge amounts of data. He explains GPS and an IMU – an inertial measurement unit that takes half of the boot – are the two things that work together to chart the road, and thus drive the car.
As we leave the starting line – noticeably at the back of a race – it is quickly clear that Brighton drives the car, rather than the car itself. Blackburn says "no … no … no" while he closely monitors the screens, so that Brighton knows that the data is not accurate enough to drive the car independently.
As we come out of the corner after Gurney Hall and in the straight line, the system finds its feet, and soon the car makes a deliberate gap to show us what the autonomous driving system is capable of doing. It's reassuring to see that it can work, but soon enough, Brighton has his hands on the wheel, taking control.
For the rest of the hill climb, it's a regular back-and-forth of autonomous driving and human control, with Brighton and Blackburn working together to judge what's certain. When the car is self-driving, the inputs are crisp without the sweetness of a human driver (proficient).
It rolls at a maximum speed of 35 mph and Blackburn tells me that the measurement of the car's position is less than 20mm and can go up to 250mm of that. If that goes beyond, Blackburn asks Brighton to take over
Overall, it's incredibly flawed. There are a number of quasi- failures with bales of hay where Brighton comes in and, all the while, I sit right in the back watching like a hawk.
Despite my strained nerves, there are a number of we should not expect this to lead as an advanced autonomous car. The project was developed solely for this festival of speed – a silver Mustang to celebrate the festival 's silver anniversary – and was done in six weeks. It does not use the lidar or radar technology used by almost all modern cars currently under test and, most importantly, it works with an old car that does not have the precise steering and feedback of cars. # 39; aujourd & # 39; hui. Basically, Siemens and Cranfield University have chosen a terribly delicate project.
As Brighton says, "This is not an autonomous car at the cutting edge of technology. It's a very different project to mix new technology with old classic machines. We use this to inspire people. There is a massive shortage of skills in this area – we simply do not have enough engineers. "
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