Audi showed its prototype driverless RS7 to the world in October 2014 when it made a high-speed lap at Hockenheim circuit completely autonomously. The human involvement was not present at all, like acceleration, steering and braking were all done by the car on its own. The accuracy of the lap was “within centimetres” and Audi seemed really happy about it.
The funny thing about that test was the codename of the car, ‘Bobby’, and now meet its big bad brother ‘Robby’, an improved and meaner version, of course.
Robby in Action
Packing the same 552bhp Audi engine as Bobby, Robby is one mean machine that is 400kg lighter and features more advanced software and sensor tech. unlike most of sports car drivers, Robby did 2.5-mile Sonoma Raceway Circuit in California in amazing 2m01.1sec. Audi is over joyed as Thomas Muller, Audi’s man in charge of brake and steering assistance tech, broke the news but keeping the names and car models under the veil.
He further added that “We took the Audi RS 7 piloted driving concept to its physical limits lap after lap and it handled the task with uniform precision.”
According to Audi, Robby is building its knowledge through the use of sensors, data processing, vehicle control and stabilisation technology which has been developed as part of Robby’s robotic track days.
Audi Robby on track
This whole knowledgebase is going to be influencing the series production systems later on helping “Jack”, a codename for Audi A7, another test mule. Jack is fully capable of driving at speeds of up to 80mph on the motorways, being completely autonomous.
The laborious efforts of Audi engineers will be coming in action in the new generation Audi A8 which is due in 2016. This car will be featuring a ‘piloted driving’ function which will perform driving functions like stopping, acceleration and steering all by itself on the motorways at the speeds of up to 37mph. In high-end production cars, the autonomous and semi-autonomous driving, stopping, and lane-changing in the traffic will become more and more important feature.
Mercedes S-class current version and a few of VW Passat specific versions are featuring them already.
