For a $1 million prize-winning robotic car like Stanford’s “Junior,” the Volkswagen Passat that snagged second place at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge last month, you might expect a snazzy parking space on campus. It should come as no surprise, then, that Junior’s home is being upgraded from a small Quonset hut on Stock Farm Road to a full-fledged automotive research center.

Thanks to a $5.75 million donation by Volkswagen, Junior will be part of a new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab (VAIL) at Stanford. The center, for which construction has not yet begun, will also house a teaching and research program called CarLab.

“This is a great and successful partnership with a first-class university,” said Burkhard Huhnke, executive director of Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Laboratory (VW-ERL) in an interview with The Daily. “[Our aims consist of] creating future projects focusing on automotive topics and combining different initiatives under the umbrella of VAIL to use the synergy potential — one of the defined goals of the VAIL. This is a great opportunity for both partners.”

According to Huhnke, Volkswagen’s donation covers $2 million toward construction costs and $750,000 per year for the following five years to fund research activities focused on driver assistance, human-machine interfacing and the environment.

CarLab faculty will include Mechanical Engineering Prof. Chris Gerdes, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Prof. Sebastian Thrun and Communication Prof. Clifford Nass, who is also a professor of computer science and sociology.

Thrun’s work focuses on the road and the environment, while Nass covers communication between human and vehicle. Gerdes, who is involved in vehicle dynamics and control, will also serve as the lab’s director.

“What we are trying to do is to forge a community at Stanford, [one] where everyone interested in automotive challenges can come together to meet them,” Gerdes said, adding that the community is open to anyone who wants to actively participate in radically re-envisioning the future of the automobile and work with real cars.

“The exciting part of CarLab is that we are bringing together people who build technology with people who understand the psychology of technology from both Stanford and industry,” Nass said. “I think it will be wonderful for my students and me to be able to interact with people who are making cars more intelligent and effective.”

The aims of CarLab are manifold. According to Nass, the first is to make fundamental discoveries in all aspects of car design, from computer science to mechanical engineering, to psychology and communication. The second is to apply improvements to actual cars in the marketplace, and the third is to facilitate interactions between the University and the industry.

According to Huhnke, Volkswagen views Junior — which it helped build with Stanford — as a highly competitive autonomous vehicle. The company finds Thrun’s work to be strong and their partnership to be successful. Prior to Junior, Thrun worked with Volkswagen together to create another robotic car, Stanley, which won DARPA’s national Grand Challenge race in 2005.

“Since Volkswagen has the Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, they are not a distant company but in fact a close neighbor to us,” Gerdes said. “Housing these activities together will bring campus researchers together and lead to innovations that are broader than any one of us could accomplish alone.”

There are numerous practical applications to this robotic vehicle research. According to Nass, the way to dramatically improve the performance of automobiles along a number of dimensions is to make cars “smarter.”

For example, Gerdes explained that a dramatic reduction in engine emissions over the last few decades was only possible due to computer control; computer-automated production systems such as stability control have also been shown to reduce loss of control accidents by approximately 30 percent.

“What you will see in the near future are more driver assistance systems that aid the driver in tasks such as lane keeping, emergency braking and collision avoidance,” Gerdes said.

In preparing to release technology to the general public, a master research agreement was signed between Stanford and VW-ERL, with the terms of the agreement varying depending on individual arrangements for intellectual property.

“Generally, if something is developed by Stanford researchers, it is owned by Stanford,” Gerdes explained. “If it is developed jointly, according to the standards of patent law, it is owned jointly. Volkswagen’s rights to research that it sponsors are the same as any other company. There is no special access being sold here.”

In creating and redesigning automotive technology, CarLab will also provide students with vital contacts in the automobile industry and allow them to develop applicable skills that are needed in the job market.

“Through this partnership,” Huhnke said, “we would like to attract Stanford graduates to the Volkswagen family — Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, VW and Audi.”