Autonomous driving with continuous drift

Stanford University’s engineer team, Dynamic Design Lab, is researching stable autonomous driving control even when driving beyond the limits of automobiles. Safe driving is important in automatic driving, but driving beyond the stability limits is necessary to avoid unexpected hazards.

For this reason, the research team focused on car drift driving. Drorian DMC-12, which appeared as a time machine in the 1985 movie Back to the Future in 2015, was remodeled to create a vehicle that can autonomously power slide. At the time in 2015, it succeeded in autonomously driving the so-called donutton, which rotates around obstacles. Four years later, it has evolved to be able to run the test course only with continuous drift.

If you look at the released video, you can see it drifting between the cones lined up. If you see that the tire marks are in almost the same position even after repeated times, you can see that autonomous driving has evolved in this way with the accuracy and boldness that a professional driver can look like. The in-vehicle video of turning the steering wheel at will is also interesting.

If such a technology is put to practical use, the risk avoidance scenarios during autonomous driving may increase, and safe driving may be possible. In addition, this technology can be helpful not only for emergency driving but also for autonomous driving on snowy roads. The name of the Drorian vehicle equipped with this autonomous driving system is MARTY. It is named after the main character in the movie. Related information can be found here .