Toyota Stages an Impressive ‘Fast and Furious’ Display with Pair of AI-Driven Drifting Race Cars

“Toyota Pulls Off a Fast and Furious Demo With Dual Drifting AI-Powered Race Cars”

“Toyota and Stanford build a self-drifting Supra and tackle a problem intrinsic to the quest for safe, reliable self-driving cars: How to teach a machine to handle what it hasn’t seen before, an event researchers call the ‘edge case.’”

Well, isn’t this just ace? Among all the unprecedented technological strides, our privileged pals at Toyota and Stanford decided to use their scientific prowess for something humanity really needs: a self-drifting Supra! Yeah, easing your daily life is passé now; the future is all about making your vehicle dance like it’s on America’s Got Talent.

This isn’t just an idle whim, though; there’s method in the madness. They’re trying to solve an ongoing problem for the successful deployment of self-driving cars – the pesky ‘edge cases’. That’s research lingo for events the machine hasn’t learned to cope with yet. You know, those small minor issues like unexpected object, wildlife, or pedestrian throwing themselves at the car’s path. Who would’ve thought driving was so complicated, right?

In order to teach their self-driving cars to handle these heart-stopping situations, Toyota and Stanford decided the best approach was to teach the vehicle to drift, all Fast and Furious style. Because when you compute driving challenges, everyone’s first thought is obviously, ‘let’s drift around some cones without hitting them’.

But sarcasm aside, Dr. Khatib (a professor at Stanford) and his team have made a significant achievement. Their drift system uses reinforcement learning, an AI-based method where the car teaches itself through repeated trial and error. It’s like teaching a toddler how to walk. Except this toddler weighs a couple tons and can easily smash through a brick wall.

Long story short, Toyota and Stanford had a eureka moment and ingeniously decided self-drifting was the answer to building more reliable self-driving cars. Rather unorthodox, yes, but who are we to question these brilliant minds? After all, now when your self-driving car decides to drift around a pedestrian, you’ll know it’s not showing off, it’s just applying what it’s been taught to tackle unexpected scenarios. So, sit back and enjoy the wild ride.

Read the original article here: https://www.wired.com/story/toyota-stanford-ai-tandem-drifting-cars/