Two years ago, the idea of driverless cars on our roads seemed crazy to many people. Today, the technology is being built into our cars, and a driverless Audi RS7 is set to lap Hockenheim at the same pace as a professional racing driver. The event on October 19 will show just how far driverless cars have come.
Audi has been working on autonomous vehicles for a number of years. In 2009, it tested a driverless Audi TTS on the Bonneville Salt Flats. In 2010 that TTS drove the Pikes Peak mountain race circuit in Colorado, followed by some impressive laps on California’s Thunderhill Raceway in 2012. Back then, the TTS couldn’t quite keep up with the pro drivers, but the RS7 is able to do just that.
Although Audi has received licenses for testing its driverless cars on public roads in Florida and California, the company says that the race track is the most demanding place for testing driverless cars. This, it says, is due to the high levels of precision and entire lack of errors that are required. The RS7 will use “specially corrected GPS signals for orientation on the track” that are accurate to within 1 cm and will receive data via WLAN or high-frequency radio should the need for fallback arise…
The automaker claims that the technologies it is developing for driverless cars will be featuring in vehicles by the end of this decade. These technologies will include cars’ ability to take over steering and acceleration when they’re in a traffic jam and automatic parking maneuvering.
The lap of Audi’s driverless RS7 around Hockenheim will be broadcast on the company’s website on October 19.
Old-timey motorheads like me will be waiting and watching.
Eideard 
“The Secret History of the Robot Car : How self-driving vehicles took off” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/the-secret-history-of-the-robot-car/380791/ Also: “The U.S. Congress has mandated that by the year 2015, one-third of ground combat vehicles will be unmanned, and the DOD is now developing a multitude of unmanned systems that it intends to rapidly field. Meanwhile, thousands of robotics researchers worldwide are making impressive gains in networking robots and boosting the sophistication and autonomy of these systems.” http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/autonomous-robots-in-the-fog-of-war/
Audi’s Self-Driving Car Hits 150 MPH on an F1 Track http://www.wired.com/2014/10/audis-self-driving-car-hits-150-mph-f1-track/ On Sunday, a group of Audi engineers closely watched as the largely stock RS7, nicknamed “Bobby,” lapped the Formula One track {at Hockenheimring – see http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/hockenheimring_2012.jpg }. The 560-horsepower car took the six straightaways at full throttle. It precisely hit each of the 17 turns, topping out at 149 mph. It completed the lap in roughly 2 minutes, 10 seconds, about 30 seconds slower than the times posted by the professionally-trained humans in the DTM races held after the Audi demonstration.
All-new Audi flagship’s autonomous driving system to function “better than human beings” http://www.motoring.com.au/news/2014/prestige-and-luxury/audi/a8/next-gen-audi-a8-drives-better-than-you-46963 “‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, while speaking at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium last Friday.