Stanley.

“These technologies will save lives in the civilian domain, as they are making motoring safer.” These words from Professor Thrun encapsulate exactly what Volkswagen was seeking to achieve with the development of “Stanley”: intelligent technology which doesn’t take over the task of driving, but provides the driver with meaningful assistance. In the “Stanley” research vehicle, however, the driver was indeed replaced by six computers, along with numerous sensors and actuators.

Six motherboards featuring Pentium M processors with a clock speed of 1.6 gigahertz – the sort of technology found in any laptop – were combined to form a single integral network with high computing power. A large number of sensors endowed “Stanley” with all the vital senses: to allow it to see, five laser systems with an optical range of up to 75 metres in front of the vehicle were mounted on the roof of the Touareg, along with a video camera and a long-range radar with a range of up to 250 metres.

The data used for pinpointing the current position to within 20 centimetres was supplied by a high-precision AGPS (Advanced Global Positioning System) coupled to the wheel speed sensors. An internal measuring device with six degrees of freedom served to establish the vehicle’s orientation along the three axes (direction, inclination and balance), assisted by two separate GPS aerials.

Depending on the specific system and vehicle speed, the sensors relayed their information to the computer network between 10 and 100 times every second. This translates into some 250 megabytes (approximately a third of the capacity of a CD-ROM) of sensor data an hour which had to be processed by the computers in real time – in other words, the instant it was received. Unless the camera was also switched on, in which case they had to deal with an extra 5 gigabytes or so of information every 5 minutes. This is roughly the same quantity of data that can be stored on a single-layer DVD.