As promised, Audi let its autonomous RS 7 Piloted Driving Concept car lap the Hockenheim over this past weekend’s DTM season finale.
While it is undoubtedly a milestone in autonomous driving, as the car completed a lap of the track at racing speed without a driver, it wasn’t quite the most spectacular thing to watch. The car was programmed to do a lap as clean as possible, so you won’t see the RS 7 nearing its limits – there are no power slides and braking before corners seems excessive.
The car needed just slightly over two minutes to complete a lap of the Grand Prix track in Hockenheim. For orientation on the track, the prototype used specially corrected GPS signals, with the GPS data being transmitted to the vehicle via WiFi according to the automotive standard and redundantly via high-frequency radio.
Additionally, 3D cameras in the car filmed the track, and a computer program compared the cameras’ image information against a data set stored on board. All these technologies combined allowed the RS 7 Piloted Driving Concept to orient itself on the track within centimeters.
“The top performance by the Audi RS 7 today substantiates the skills of our development team with regard to piloted driving at Audi,” said Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, Board Member for Technical Development at Audi AG. “The derivations from series production, particularly in terms of precision and performance, are of great value for our further development steps,” the executive added.
Scroll down to watch the RS 7 Piloted Driving in action.
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