Toyota is teaching driverless cars to deliberately skid sideways at high speed while still safely navigating a course. The company says the technique wouldn鈥檛 be used on the road as part of the normal driving experience, but could give an autonomous car the ability to recover from skids in an emergency.
Drifting is a driving technique in which drivers intentionally lose traction but maintain control to slide the car sideways around corners (see video, above). Drifting cars around tracks has become a sport in its own right.
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Now, a team of researchers at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in California has shown that a driving artificial intelligence model can make a Toyota GR Supra or Lexus LC 500 drift smoothly around a course with multiple turns, sliding within 10 centimetres of targets. The cars, which have a driver sitting inside in case things go wrong, enter a skid and screech sideways at angles as large as 63 degrees off their direction of travel.
The researchers think an AI that can use the technique could be useful in extreme circumstances. 鈥淲hen a vehicle is driving and unexpectedly hits a patch of ice on the road, we need our AI to control the vehicle at its limits to ensure safety,鈥�听蝉补测蝉 , who researches autonomous driving at TRI, but wasn鈥檛 involved in this work. 鈥淚magine if the skills of the best drivers in the world were part of your vehicle鈥檚 autonomy system and allowed you to feel confident that your vehicle can handle any situation.鈥�
, who drives drift cars himself and teaches test drivers for car-makers at CAT Driver Training, says the Toyota research is interesting, but goes beyond circumstances that will generally arise in the real world.
Hoad says modern cars and tyres will only begin to lose grip when under cornering forces of around 0.9 g, but that passengers start to feel uneasy or ill beyond 0.2 g or 0.3 g. 鈥淚n reality, autonomous vehicles should be driving [at speeds that are] sub grip-limit,鈥� he says. So, the chance of a driverless car designed for comfort losing grip in normal conditions are slim. 鈥淏ut you could imagine that if the vehicle had that skill, it might save you from a 1-in-a-million incident,鈥� says Hoad.
arXiv
