Touareg Stanley
Laying the foundation for driver assistance systems of the future
Sand as far as the eye can see. Plus a Touareg. No, this isn’t about an African tribe, nor is it a success story from the Dakar Rally. This is about Stanley, a Volkswagen Touareg that can manage very well indeed without a driver. Stanley is equipped with numerous high-tech systems that perform the responsible tasks of a “human” driver.
Stanley is an autonomous laboratory designed to test and further develop the technology of the future. Numerous sensors and a combination of four laser detectors gather vast amounts of data. Stereo visual display units, highly-developed 24-Gigahertz radar equipment and an extremely accurate, satellite-supported navigation system show the exact location of the vehicle digitally to the exact millimeter at any point on the journey and calculate the optimum route to the preset destination.
This concentrated flow of information is fed to the high-performance computer center with its seven 1.6-Gigahertz processors located in the trunk of the Touareg. The specially developed software computes the necessary changes in speed and direction and makes sure that Stanley reaches its destination safely.
Grand Challenge winner
Stanley is pretty nippy, too. The Touareg developed by Volkswagen Research in Wolfsburg in cooperation with Stanford University and the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto impressively confirmed its speed during the Grand Challenge 2005, a 220 kilometer race for autonomous cars. Stanley crossed the finishing line first, covering the journey through the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas in just under seven hours.
Although Stanley and all its skills is far ahead of its time, the Tourareg can today be found on display in a museum, or more accurately in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC, the world’s largest technology museum. That is in part due to Stanley’s uniqueness, which makes the vehicle a very popular attraction, and in part to Stanley’s even more impressive successor (Junior). The prototype Touareg also demonstrates very well what Volkswagen customers can expect from their vehicles in future. Some customers are already familiar with adaptive cruise control or ESP + driving recommendation, but Stanley and its successors have and will continue to pioneer further driver assistance systems, researching and developing into technologies that bring even greater safety and comfort.