5,500 km on autopilot: from San Francisco to New York in 9 days

March 22 blue Audi SQ5 decided to ride around the country. Having refueled with fresh gasoline, the car checked the list of things on the road:
')

• Camera on the windshield for viewing lanes, pointers and traffic lights (in color);
• Four medium-range radars (80m) in the corners, front cameras with LIDaR;
• The main radar on the front bumper;
• Two remote view devices in front and behind;
• Six laser locators on the "stern";
• Software and hardware system Advanced Drive Assistance Systems from Delphi;
• 6 observer engineers.

Audi was staffed and confident of success. Cross North America? Easily! After all, this is already getting up her younger sister, the Audi A7, which in one breath slipped 500 miles to Las Vegas. And the little cars from Google? Those generally wound 700 thousand miles . Why, then, will the Audi SQ5, equipped with the latest Delphi software code, not be able to drive 15 states from San Francisco to New York? Will and will do. Ignition, navigator, let's go.



Travel notes machine

Start: San Francisco. 99% of the time I go by myself. A couple of times an engineer sat behind the wheel. Reasons: repair work on the road and narrowing to one lane with oncoming traffic; aggressive lane change to skip cops. Finish: New York.



Engineer's travel notes:

Day 1: Cool, I go without hands. I am proud to work in Delphi - the company that created the electric starter, built-in radio and navigation.

Day 2: Food without hands again, what to do?

Day 3: God, what kind of Texas is huge and monotonous, no matter how the computer overheats.

Day 4: Bored. If you think: back in 2004, the car on autopilot traveled only 11 km, and then caught fire. A year later, the system passed 200 km in 7 hours. And now I'm sitting and stupid out the window. Why did we try so hard?

Day 5-7: Autopilot tested in conditions of poor visibility and rainy weather. Sorry, we could not verify the system of recognition of gestures of the traffic controller.

Day 8: Wow, hedgehog, I was scared. We just passed a two-story iron bridge. Given the fact that the main radar of the machine is oriented and reacts to the metal, we could easily fly into the river. We were lucky that the system automatically rebuilt on additional sensors.

Day 9: Finally New York. I'll sleep off, and then sit down to rake terabytes of data.

Video report engineers.



PS All the facts in the note are reliable and have not changed in favor of style.