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Automated Vehicle Control Beyond the Stability Limits

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Making cars safer by programming them to drift

To ensure safety in a wide range of scenarios, we must maximize the range of maneuvers that automated vehicles can reliably perform. The conventional approach is to restrict operation below the stability limits, where the rotation of the vehicle is open-loop stable. This is a trade-off: we sacrifice agility, in exchange for making it easy for an average driver - or naive automated system - to control.

One can access a much wider range of maneuvers - and therefore, avoid accidents in a larger number of scenarios - by understanding how to control an automated vehicle beyond the stability limits. Expert drivers in drifting competitions, for example, can precisely position the car while purposefully operating in open-loop unstable conditions. 

Automated vehicles have the opportunity - and the responsibility - to be much better than the average driver, and thereby remove the need for this trade-off. This thesis, Automated Vehicle Control Beyond the Stability Limits, presents a series of contributions towards this goal, supported throughout by fully autonomous experiments on MARTY, a heavily-modified 1981 DMC DeLorean.

The full manuscript will be available through the Stanford Library on 12/5/19. This webpage highlights some key aspects of the work, including pictures/videos of experiments, and descriptions of MARTY. While several publications are still pending, the ones that have been printed are listed here.

This page was last updated on: 7/13/2019.

Meet MARTY

If you're going to build an autonomous drifting car, why not do it with some style?

MARTY is a 1981 DMC DeLorean that has been extensively modified to serve as a flexible testbed for automated control at and beyond the limits of handling.

More detailed information on the build is available here.