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Do you often find yourself in one of those rage-inducing moments while driving and coming across a motorist who has NO consideration for fellow drivers whatsoever?
What if we told you German automaker Audi is testing autonomous cars and claims one of their new research vehicles drives like, well, a considerate human?
It seems the self-driving Audi A7 has been tested on the roads alongside other motorists and is now capable of adaptive driving that mimics a human driver. In fact, the German car manufacturer goes as far as to describe A7 as “a research car with social competence”.
Nicknamed Jack, the A7 piloted driving concept runs on what is knows as the “central driver assistance controller”, or zFAS.
Using high-performance, state-of-the-art processors and sensors, the A7 is able to take in and evaluate its surroundings in real time. It then maps out a model that represents the current driving situation as accurately as possible.
Using the zFAS, the car is able to adapt what it has learned and calculate upcoming manoeuvres in advance.
To add to that, Jack has also been making significant progress and the recent improvements have been quite impressive: one of them is the A7′s ability to leave a wider gap when overtaking trucks and another new development is the way Jack can activate the indicators and move closer to the lane markers when changing lanes.
With Google, Tesla and Volvo heavily invested in developing and testing self-driving cars, Audi is jump-starting its self-driving technology by working closely with the German government.
A stretch of German road now contains high-tech roadside posts that can interact with the car’s radar to transfer data – as part of a plan to improve car-to-infrastructure communications. The project is due to begin testing in 2018.
