Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the California-based research and development division of Toyota, has recently unveiled a self-drifting Toyota Supra.
Inspired by Professional Drift Drivers TRI seeks to improve vehicle safety
While that sounds awesome, the project actually aims to provide data on how the brand can improve future safety technologies on all of its mobility products.
With the help of the heavily modified Supra dodging obstacles in a closed track, Toyota can analyze how controlled autonomous drifting can be used to avoid accidents. In real life, these are commonly caused by sudden obstacles on the road like other cars and pedestrians.
The technology itself, if applied to consumer models, can augment a regular driver’s skills (or lack thereof), especially when responding to dangerous road situations.
According to TRI, the software which is the backbone of the autonomous drifting technology is able to calculate an alternate trajectory for a vehicle every twentieth of a second. That’s around .05 seconds, which is of course faster than most normal human reaction times.
TRI's self-drifting Toyota Supra
It does this by way of nonlinear model predictive control, combined with vehicle dynamics, and control design insights from how a controlled oversteer (aka drifting) is performed.
So essentially, the self-drifting Toyota Supra is driven by a computer which takes in all the aforementioned data to “yield a control scheme” for drifting. It then applies the appropriate inputs to the car’s steering, gearbox, clutch, and throttle to initiate a drift.
The car itself was also specced up to Formula Drift standards. This means it has an aftermarket suspension, a roll cage, fire suppression, a non-factory tune, among other modifications.
Collecting data is crucial for this project
Of note, the project in question was started a year ago by TRI, together with Stanford University’s Dynamic Design Lab. GReddy, a Japanese aftermarket performance tuning company has also pitched in.
Ken Gushi, one of Japan’s top drifting competitors, is also involved in the autonomous drifting Supra project. Presumably, they utilized Gushi-San's skills as a benchmark to improve the “self-drifting” Supra’s abilities.
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