Audi licensed to self-drive in Nevada

One of several self-driving Audi's. O vey.

THE state of Nevada in the U.S. this week granted Audi a federal licence to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state.

The granting of the licence co-incided with Audi’s demonstration of Audi Piloted Driving at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Annie Lien, senior engineer at VW’s reseach laboratory, used her smartphone to instruct her Audi to go park itself in a cavernous undergound parking garage. A video shows how the driverless car finds its bay and then reverse-parks fautlessly into the very narrow bay. Lien then recalls the car to meet her at the exit.

Audi is is the first car maker to get a licence to test this system on public roads, but it is the third company to get “autopilot road licences”, with Google and Continental already holding one each.

Audi is no stranger to self-drive cars.

Google used one of its TTs to test the Google autonomous drive system, and last year in the U.S., another Audi TT, raced around the 156 turns on the 19,99 km Pikes Peak climb on auto-pilot in just 27 minutes.

The overall record time on the mountain was set in 2011 by Nobuhiro Tajima, at 9:51.278. He was in a Suzuki SX4 Hill Climb Special of Monster Racing.

The Pikes Peak racing TT was developed with the Volkswagen Group ERL and Stanford University,

Toyota and its Lexus division also took a step closer to the autonomous car this week with the unveiling of their Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle (AASRV) at a press conference in the run-up to CES 2013 in Las Vegas.

Based on the company’s Integrated Safety Management Concept, the AASRV test vehicle includes technology that could be used to make a self-driving car, but that is not Lexus’s goal. The company’s approach is to use this technology to enhance the driver’s skill.

The AASRV is equipped with automated control systems working with sensors such as high-definition stereo cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) laser tracking. These do everything from scanning for objects up to 150 metres away to seeing if the traffic lights are green.

The Lexus also has radar on the front and sides of the car to track objects and eliminate blind spots, while gyroscopes, accelerometers and GPS track the car’s angle and orientation.