printable versionStanford, Volkswagen team up to create automotive research lab
Junior, the Stanford Racing Team’s robotic Passat, claimed a $1 million prize for finishing second in the recent DARPA Urban Challenge after successfully navigating through traffic by relying on its electronic eyes and brain.
A Quonset hut on Stock Farm Road that has been the home of Junior, Stanford's award-winning robotic Volkswagen Passat, will be replaced with a new center for automotive research, financed with a $5.75 million donation from Volkswagen.
The new high-bay building, complete with car lifts and machine shops, will be called the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, or VAIL. The Stanford teaching and research program it will house has been dubbed CarLab.
"The mission of CarLab will be to radically rethink the automobile in order to deliver unprecedented levels of safety and driver and passenger enjoyment," said Chris Gerdes, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who will serve as CarLab's director.
A research agreement has been signed between Stanford and Volkwagen's Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto. "The work done at VAIL will help to further develop the future of mobility and autonomous driving that we started with our partnership on the DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles, Stanley and Junior," said Burkhard Huhnke, executive director of Volkswagen's Palo Alto lab.
Volkswagen and Stanford's collaboration started with two successful vehicles in the Grand Challenge races, sponsored by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In the 2005 race, Stanley autonomously steered itself through the desert using cameras, lasers and radar to find its way. Stanford won that national competition. This year, Junior, running an urban course in Victorville, Calif., placed second.
Volkswagen will donate $2 million to construct the building housing VAIL and will provide $750,000 a year for five years to fund research and teaching activities at CarLab.
The success of the two driverless Volkswagens showed the value of collaboration with industry, said Jim Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering. "Transportation is a vital part of life, and our goal as engineers is to find innovative ways to meet important human needs."
VAIL and CarLab are expected to bring together researchers from a number of Stanford disciplines and outside industrial partners.
"The initial focus for VAIL will be vehicle safety, mobility and environmental performance," Plummer said. "Already signed up for space in the facility are the research groups of computer science and electrical engineering Professor Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Stanford Racing Team that fielded Junior and Stanley; mechanical engineering Associate Professor Chris Gerdes, whose research group is studying cleaner combustion and advanced vehicle dynamics control; and Communication Department Professor Clifford Nass, whose research studies the psychology of making cars safer and more enjoyable."
Nass is fascinated by the conversations people have with their cars. Navigation systems now accept spoken commands from drivers and offer directions in return. What if that same voice could sense a driver's sour mood and offer some soothing words when road rage seemed imminent, such as "Great job avoiding that driver"?
"Now that cars can talk, we have an amazing opportunity to do things we couldn't do before," Nass said.
The VAIL facility will be housed in a new 8,000-square-foot lab located near the corner of Stock Farm Road and Campus Drive West.