The Volkswagen Touareg Stanley on display in Silicon Valley
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The penultimate stop in the Touareg Stanley’s international exhibition tour is The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.
The prototype will be on display there from 20 June to 18 July 2008. It was here in the Silicon Valley region near San Francisco that the Stanley project was originally born.
Stanley was the first automobile to master the “Grand Challenge” for robot cars, gaining itself the reputation of a pioneering development project for autonomous vehicles.
The Touareg set out on the 212-kilometre race through the Mojave Desert amidst a field of 22 other competitors on 8 October 2005. Stanley travelled through the desert all on its own – no driver, no external intervention. It was the first to cross the finishing line after six hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds. Never before had a motor vehicle managed anything close to such a distance completely autonomously.
This prototype is equipped with an array of driver-assistance systems which are now featured in standard-production vehicles. Those systems include, among others, the Electric Stabilisation Program and Navigation Assistance, Automatic Distance Control plus Front Assist for a reduced braking distance, as well as the Lane Assist lane-keeping system. Special high-tech fittings in the Stanley also include laser detectors, stereo optical devices, radar sensors, exceptionally precise GPS systems and control software specifically developed for the vehicle.
Like its successor project, “Junior”, Stanley is the product of collaboration between the Stanford University (which gave the car its name) and the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory – both based in California’s Silicon Valley. The third participant in the project was the Volkswagen Research and Development division in Wolfsburg.
Source: Volkswagen
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