Toyota Research Institute has showcased its newest achievement: a self-driving Supra. It's a specifically designed car that will aid autonomous driving technologies in controlling a vehicle in dangerous scenarios.
Although the world's first autonomous drift may appear to be a PR ploy, Toyota is taking it very seriously. To run a vehicle beyond the boundaries of control, the vehicle incorporates a lot of complex technologies, including TRI's Nonlinear Model Predictive Control.
The objective is to create self-driving technology that can avoid a collision in the event of an emergency. For example, suppose a car is traveling on snow or icy roads and loses traction and spins. Toyota can make its advanced driver assistance systems more effective when they're most required by educating its car to manage certain circumstances.
Toyota designed the safety system in collaboration with Stanford University's Dynamic Design Lab, as well as learning everything it could from GReddy's performance experts and drift icon Ken Gushi. Toyota claims it wants to offer every driver the same amount of control over the vehicles he drives as Gushi does.
Even if they constantly stay to the speed limit, these systems will learn to be as competent as a professional driver when it comes to obstacle avoidance and automobile control. The aim is that the system will be ready to manage the automobile in a circumstance when prior training and quick reactions are required to avert an accident.
A particularly adapted Supra with computer-controlled steering, throttle, clutch displacement, sequential gearbox, and individual wheel brakes is the car they constructed. The car was customized in the same way that Formula Drift cars are.
As a result of this drift, TRI researchers are getting closer to fully comprehending the whole range of vehicle performance. To balance a drift elegantly around a track, the software they created creates a new trajectory every 20th of a second.
The Supra was equipped with computer-controlled steering, clutch displacement, individual wheel brakes, and computer-controlled throttle on this model. The system can perform more than a conventional driver with just individual wheel brakes. According to Toyota, the NMPC controller works on an x86 computer.
Don't miss the video below to see how Toyota’s Autonomous Drift works.