Stanford’s Self-Driving Car Tears It Up On Racetrack – Tops 120 MPH
Source: singularityhub.com - Sunday, August 19, 2012
Shelley, Stanford's self-driving car, tops 120 mph on racetrack straightaways, but still has work to do to catch up to human drivers. Just as Google’s self-driving Prius goes for distance, recently passing 300,000 miles , Stanford’s self-driving Audi TTS instead has the need for speed. The Audi, known as Shelley, sped around the Thunderhill Raceway track north of Sacramento topping 120 miles per hour on straightaways. The less than two and a half minutes it took to complete the 3-mile course is comparable to times achieved by professional drivers. Shelley is the product of a collaboration between Stanford’s Dynamic Designs Lab and the Volkswagen Electronics Research lab. In 2010 Shelley put the pedal to the medal, speeding and drifting through the 156 turns up to the top of Pike’s Peak racecourse. The current run through Thunderhill is another example of how Stanford and Volkswagen engineers are set on pushing robotic car performance to its limits, quite different from Google’s singular goal of teaching their car how to obey traffic signs and avoid joggers. Sure Google’s will most likely be the first self-driving cars to legally take passengers, but they still can’t slide into parking spaces James Bond style. Shelley’s fast, but not quite as fast as humans. Professional driver times at Thunderhill still beat Shelley’s times by a few seconds. Associate Professor Chris Gerdes , who heads the Dynamic Designs Lab at Stanford, is tryiAlleged 'Innocence of Muslims' filmmaker taken in for interviewing by deputies
Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com - Saturday, September 15, 2012
Just after midnight, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Arab world. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies escorted a man believed to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to an awaiting car. The man declined to answer questions on his way out and wore a hat and a towel over his face. He
