Milan Polytechnic’s AIDA team has just set a new speed record for a production autonomous driving vehicle. The goal achieved is to have pushed a Maserati MC20 Coupe to 285 km/h in harsh weather conditions.
Maserati MC20 at the center of AIDA’s project
The Maserati MC20 is at the center of the project regarding autonomous driving enhancement by the Artificial Intelligence Driving Autonomous (AIDA) team at the Milan Polytechnic. The Maserati MC20 Coupe, which, in collaboration with an additional artificial intelligence and autonomous driving system, was pushed up to a speed of 285 km/h during a test that took place on the afternoon of Nov. 7. The test took place in dense fog conditions on the runway of the Piacenza San Damiano Air Force airport. The goal achieved represents the highest speed ever achieved by a car, almost mass-produced, self-driving and not managed by any humans on board.
This is a theme that fans may already be familiar with, as it has already been seen at the last two editions of the 1000 Miglia. On those occasions, the same team participated by fielding an AI-powered, self-driving MC20 Cielo.
The developers’ statements
If we take as a reference what was stated by the developers of the AIDA project at the Politecnico di Milano, the Maserati MC20 Coupé used for this speed test was a completely original sports car. Of course, we must exclude from its originality the availability of the autonomous driving system developed for the occasion. This one adopts Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires. Recall that the AIDA team project is supported by MOST, or the National Center for Sustainable Mobility. This speed record put achieved in recent days with the Maserati MC20 Coupe, which as already mentioned has been suitably modified, is the result of excellent work of the skills of the Performance division of the AIDA project.
We are talking about the PoliMOVE Autonomous Racing Team, which has made itself a protagonist in several competitions at the international level during which one of the main protagonists was precisely autonomous driving. In fact, the Team holds the absolute speed record that was achieved aboard an experimental single-seater based on the Dallara IL-15, the AV-21, in the Indy Autonomous Challenge. On that occasion, the speed achieved was 309 km/h at Kennedy Space Center in April 2022.
According to the scientific head of the AIDA project and director of the Department of Electronics, Informatics and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Sergio Matteo Savaresi, the most important part of the speed test conducted with the Maserati MC20 Coupe would be precisely the desire to test the behavior of the system in extreme situations. The entire system was created and tested for speeds falling within the parameters of the Highway Code, during the last two 1000 Miglia races. Now, as Savaresi confirmed, now with these tests the AIDA team is exploring the limits of autonomous driving technology, with the goal of making it safer and more reliable. He also added that These high-speed tests, carried out in protected areas and without a human supervisor on board, allow to safely evaluate the robustness, stability and reaction speed of the AI-driver in borderline situations, in order to increase safety in unexpected low-speed situations, typical of the urban mobility scenario.