Stanley (vehicle)

Stanley is an autonomous car of the Stanford Racing Team at Stanford University, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The team led by Professor Sebastian Thrun would pocket a cash prize of 2 million U.S. dollars, the biggest price of a robotics competition. Stanley was developed specifically for the competition.

Stanley is a modified VW Touareg. For the environment perception, the vehicle was equipped with five LIDAR sensors of the company Sick AG, as well as a camera and a GPS system. Moreover, the wheels have been modified in order to record, in the case of a lost Odometrieinformationen GPS signal. For data processing Stanley was equipped with six low - cost PCs with 1.6 GHz processor.

Successor of Stanley within the Stanford Racing Team is the modified Volkswagen Passat " Junior", the second prize in the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007.