Toyota Autonomous Drifting Car
Toyota Research Institute is developing autonomous drifting cars that guarantee active safety in extreme situations to prevent crashes, giving a normal driver the skills of a professional driver when faced with a dangerous situation while driving. The research team is developing algorithms that will allow the vehicle to cope with difficult situations like crashes autonomously.
Expert drivers can drift a car safely through a turn on slippery roads, and the autonomous drift car from Toyota is equipped with this capability to detect obstacles and autonomously maneuver around them.
The control system uses the vehicle dynamics and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to generate an entirely new trajectory every twentieth of a second to balance the car as it goes around the track. Drifting autonomously can be used to navigate around sudden obstacles or hazardous road conditions like ice to avoid accidents.
Tests of the proposed control system are conducted on a Toyota Supra, a vehicle that is mainly used for autonomous driving research.
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