Executive Speeches
24 October 2009
VAIL Keynote
Dr. Paefgen
By cruising through the Mojave Desert without any assistance, the Stanley, a Volkswagen Touareg Diesel, has earned his place in the history books and a spot in the Smithsonian. In October 2005, Stanley beat 22 other robot vehicles on a 132-mile course, becoming the first driverless vehicle to successfully navigate and win the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence integrate the technologies that allow Stanley to have a sense of his environment and autonomously avoid obstacles, thus to steer clear of trouble. In this way Stanley demonstrates promising advances in artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles.
After the victory at the Grand Challenge, the Stanford Racing Team joined the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge with the result that Junior, a Volkswagen Passat Diesel, won second place.
The features developed for the Grand and Urban Challenges will ultimately benefit our customers by making driving safer and more enjoyable in today's increasingly dense traffic.
While fully autonomous driving may be a possibility for the future, there's still a long way to go. By pursuing step by step a long term goal, such as an autonomously driven vehicle, we are already able to advance certain features that will be of use in more conventional, current driver assistance and safety systems.
As one example, Volkswagen has successfully launched an automatic park assist in Europe; a possible next step can be an advanced automatic valet parking car. You'll be eyewitness to the first prototype drive in just a minute.
Stanford and Volkswagen are ideal partners to develop these future technologies together and to make these features available for the customer.
This collaboration can draw on a long-standing relationship between the Volkswagen Group and Stanford University, which continues to increase the exchange between industrial and academic talent.
The goals are to accelerate automotive-related research on campus, increase opportunities for collaboration between VW and Stanford, and build a global community of academic and industrial partners committed to the future of automotive research. The focus is on vehicle safety, mobility and environmental performance.
To facilitate automotive-related research on campus, Volkswagen donated $2 million to Stanford to help build the VAIL building. VW is also providing $750,000 a year for five years to fund research and teaching activities, based at VAIL, where Stanford researchers and international visiting scholars will work with automotive equipment manufacturers and Silicon Valley experts.
The aims of the initiative are threefold.
First is to make fundamental discoveries in all aspects of car design, from computer science to mechanical engineering, to psychology and communication.
The second is to apply improvements to actual cars in the marketplace, and the
third is to facilitate interaction between the University and the industry.
The first VAIL workshop was held in November 2008 at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in New York. Highlights included actually witnessing our Volkswagen Passat Diesel drive autonomously through downtown New York and then unveiling the Clean Air Initiative – the vision of linked, intelligent vehicles that are able to interact with each other and their drivers, with the goal of preserving the environment.
In the future, we see real potential for a vehicle that can take this even further – automatic positioning, lane and speed adjustments and braking in emergency situations. Electronics has already become the pacesetter for new developments in cars. The complex management of engine, gearbox and driver assistance dependent on driving conditions requires an intelligent modular system architecture, which makes driving not only safer and more comfortable but also more energy efficient.
Our partnership with a top University in California such as Stanford as well as leading tech companies such as Google, Intel, Apple and Sun Microsystems is helping us gather more and more data about the future. This combination of talent is helping us develop cars that use the latest technologies to meet our customer's needs and wants. It goes without saying that Silicon Valley is synonymous with innovation and forward thinking. That's one of the reasons why Volkswagen's Electronics Research Lab is in Palo Alto.
We are here to meet through collaboration with our partners at Stanford University the challenges of tomorrow's mobility.
