Toyota Builds an Autonomous Drifting Supra Because It Can

Marvel of Technology

Love it or hate it, autonomous technology is coming along, with a variety of semi-autonomous features already present in most new vehicles today. As technology improves, there will come a time when our vehicles will drive us around, at least when we want them to, and that isn't always a bad thing. Now, Toyota has made another bit of breakthrough in the form of this autonomous drifting Supra, which is quite a marvel of technology.

Photos: Toyota

Bigger Purpose

This Supra is the world's first autonomous drifting machine using what Toyota Research Institute calls Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). However, this work isn't being done merely to entertain crowds with smokey slides. Rather, the idea behind this project is to utilize controlled, autonomous drifting to avoid accidents by navigating sudden obstacles or hazardous road conditions like black ice. 

Photos: Toyota

Track to Street

"At TRI, our goal is to use advanced technologies that augment and amplify humans, not replace them," said Avinash Balachandran, Senior Manager of TRI’s Human Centric Driving Research. "Through this project, we are expanding the region in which a car is controllable, to give regular drivers the instinctual reflexes of a professional race car driver to be able to handle the most challenging emergencies and keep people safer on the road."

Photos: Toyota

Maintaining Control

The software used to guide this Supra around a track is capable of calculating a whole new trajectory every twentieth of a second to balance the car gracefully. Combining the vehicle dynamics and control design insights from drifting-specific approaches with the generalized framework of NMPC yields a control scheme that extends the vehicle's operational domain beyond the point of tire saturation. This allows the Supra to drive beyond the notions of traditional open loop stability to where the vehicle is skidding but still controllable due to closed loop driving control.

Photos: Toyota

Smooth Transition

Toyota Research Institute was able to develop a step towards that kind of unified approach and experimentally demonstrated an NMPC controller that can smoothly transition from dynamic, non-equilibrium drifting to grip driving, while accounting for multiple objectives including road bounds.  

Photos: Toyota

Heavily Modified

This approach was tested on the special Supra, which has been customized for autonomous driving research. It is equipped with computer-controlled steering, a throttle, clutch displacement, a sequential transmission, and individual wheel braking. Vehicle state information is obtained from a dual-antenna RTK-GNSS-aided INS system at a rate of 250Hz, and the NMPC controller runs on an x86 computer. For data collection with expert drivers in a controlled environment, the suspension, engine, transmission, chassis, and safety systems have been modified to be similar to that used in Formula Drift competitions.

Photos: Toyota

Saving Lives

With any luck, Toyota hopes that one day, this type of technology can be used in road-going cars to save lives. "When faced with wet or slippery roads, professional drivers may choose to 'drift' the car through a turn, but most of us are not professional drivers,” said Jonathan Goh, TRI Research Scientist. "That's why TRI is programming vehicles that can identify obstacles and autonomously drift around obstacles on a closed track."

Photos: Toyota

>>Join the conversation about this Drifting Supra right here at ClubLexus.com.

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