Audi tested a fully equipped driverless A7 on a Florida highway at speeds up to 25 miles per hour. Governor Rick Scott, a proponent of driverless vehicles and signer of the bill that allows for testing such vehicles in the state, sat in the driver’s seat without touching the controls for part of the test. Audi requested a shutdown of Tampa’s Lee Roy Selmon Expressway while engineers ran the driverless vehicle through several real-world scenarios to test the cars’ abilities. The Lee Roy Selmon Expressway has been specifically designated as a test-bed site for driverless vehicles. The A7 was tested to see how well it responded to the presence of other vehicles on the highway including when they came into its vicinity—one test even involved a car pulling in front of it unexpectedly. Testing was halted for a short while due to a communications glitch, but apparently the car performed well. NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun’s claim during GTC 2014, “Tegra K1 is the brain of your future self-driven car”, is now undergoing testing!
Obviously, 25 MPH is much faster than what we saw at the GTC 2014 Jen Hsun keynote. You can see the K1-powered driverless module in his hand in the following image. (Click to view the video.)
For more information on the highway test, see http://phys.org/news/2014-07-audi-a7-driverless-vehicle-florida.html#jCp
Leave a Reply