The car made five runs during a week of testing, reaching the 14,100-foot summit in 27 minutes. The very fastest drivers — in cars putting down more than 900 horsepower — do it in 10 minutes in change, so clearly the car isn’t terribly fast. But the point isn’t the speed, it’s the fact there was no one at the wheel. According to Audi, race officials said an expert driver in car like the TTS would complete the course in around 17 minutes.

The point of this exercise is to push autonomous-vehicle tech to the edge and make cars the rest of us drive that much smarter and safer. By making it to the top of Pikes Peak, Audi said it is showing that autonomous technology can handle the most challenging circumstances.

“By partnering with leading institutions in Silicon Valley we seek to bring innovative technologies into our vehicles and redefine what is possible,” said Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, director of the Electronic Research Lab in Palo Alto, California, which developed the car with Audi. “The goal is to improve driver safety and save lives by creating extremely robust electronics.”

Nobody’s talking about taking you out of the equation. Audi has told us repeatedly the the goal is developing technology to enhance even the best drivers’ abilities, much like the computerized systems in a modern jet assist the best pilots.

“We are not trying to replace the driver,” Stanford professor Chris Gerdes said. “Instead we want to learn how the best drivers control the car so we can develop systems that assist our robotic driver and, eventually, you and me.”

Shelley, earlier this year at Bonneville.

Audi developed the car with help from Stanford University at Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Lab. We’ve taken a ride in this car and can tell you it almost certainly drives at least as well as you do and probably better.

It builds on the success of Stanley, a VW Touareg that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, and Junior, a VW Passat that took second in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Those vehicles used radar, sensors and cameras to track the road at relatively low speed on a closed and controlled course.

Audi named this car Shelley in honor of Michèle Mouton, an Audi rally driver and the first woman to win at Pikes Peak. The team chose a 2010 TTS because it features a fly-by-wire throttle, adaptive cruise control, a semiautomatic DSG gearbox and other gadgetry. That made it relatively easy to make the car fully autonomous using advanced algorithms, the Oracle Java real-Time System, Oracle Solaris and GPS.

Shelley uses differential GPS to track its location to within 2 centimeters, though the margin was larger on the mountain. Wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer measure its velocity and a gyroscope controls equilibrium and direction. The algorithms that make it all work run on hardware developed by Sun Microsystems.

Deciding to test the tech at Pikes Peak was a no-brainer. It’s a mix of pavement, dirt and gravel that rises 4,721 feet at an average grade of 7 percent. The testing was marred by the crash of a helicopter filming and photographing the run. Four people were injured.

Now that Audi has conquered the mountain, it plans to do some high-speed runs on pavement to further refine the technology. It is currently evaluating several tracks. Might we suggest the Nürburgring Nordschleife?

Photos and video: Audi

Here’s some video from our visit to the Electronics Research Lab and our time with Shelley the autonomous TTS. Video: Wired.com

See Also:

• Audi’s Robotic Car Drives Better Than You Do
• Audi’s Robotic Car Looks Hot In Old-School Livery
• Video: Climb Pikes Peak With The Monster
• Video: Red Bull Races to the Clouds
• Video: Racing Flat-Out to the Clouds

Authors: Chuck Squatriglia

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