Two Driverless Cars Have Begun 8,000-Mile Journey from Italy to China

By Clay Dillow Posted 07.21.2010 at 12:45 pm 10 Comments

VisLab's Driverless Auto VisLab

A team of Italian engineers is gearing up for a high-tech road rally that should impress even the outside-the-box dreamers over at DARPA: an 8,000-mile journey from Italy to China, with nobody behind the wheel. The three-month convoy will be the longest test of driverless vehicles ever conducted, taking the cars through twisting mountain passes, Moscow traffic, and harsh Siberian weather before ending up in the sprawling roadways of Shanghai in October.

Of course, when we say there's nobody behind the wheel, that's not entirely accurate. The project includes two electric-powered "driverless" vans, each of which will carry two technicians. One of them will always be in the driver seat ready to press the red "oh sh*t!" button and take control should the car's laser scanners, cameras, and software get into a situation that might turn dangerous.

Each van will work in tandem with a manned leader van that will drive ahead and give its driverless counterpart cues on where it's going next. But the driverless vehicle will be responsible for negotiating traffic and responding to the environment and obstacles around it. Only one driverless van and leader vehicle will operate at a time; the other pair will be hauled behind on a truck. The vans require an eight-hour charge after every few hours on the road, so even traveling at speeds between 30-37 miles per hour -- not very fast but not a crawl either -- the going will be very slow.

The transcontinental trek is more of a stress test for driverless technology than a demonstration, and the project leaders concede that the cars will likely need quite a bit of help from humans. But the 100 terabytes of information collected en route will go a long way toward helping the driverless technology maker, VisLab, improve its intelligent systems and artificial vision.

The idea is that someday 100 percent driverless technology could be used to freight cargo across continents autonomously or to reduce troop risk by running driverless military supply convoys, goals more or less congruent with those put forth by DARPA when it created the Urban Challenge several years ago. Of course, there's one more immediate challenge facing the team: Where, exactly, does one charge up a next-gen electric vehicle in the middle of Siberia?

[NPR]

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10 Comments

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winemaster2

07/21/10 at 1:42 pm

What is the point ! All a lot of waste of time and money. AS it is one too many drivers and some even engineers themselves are bad drivers. Bottom line is that there is no redeemable social and practical value of such an item. The world already have drone aircraft, robot for just about every thing.

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GregNJ

07/21/10 at 1:49 pm

Just stay the heck out of the fast lane!

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RogueSquirrel

07/21/10 at 1:58 pm

winemaster2...It's people like you that will keep the world in the stone age. Get out of the way and go live in your box.

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vivioo7

07/21/10 at 2:53 pm

+1
will it be autonomous or remote controlled?

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Greatusername

07/21/10 at 3:29 pm

As far as I can tell based on the article, it looks like it's autonomous, although it doesn't decide where to go on its own. It looks like it's basically a very advanced following-bot. The manned vehicle will drive ahead, and the robotic vehicle will make the calculations necessary to keep up with its handlers.

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guruuswa

07/22/10 at 5:53 am

although this experiment is pointless, its actually quite fun.

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phildo

07/22/10 at 7:36 am

I dont see how some of you think this is pointless. This is the first step in cars that drive themselves. I can easily imagine a future where i just need to get in my car and let it do the work. I always see people following right up on the butt of the person in front of them. Going from gas to brake. Driving way to fast or slow. Not to mention all the phone texters and woman putting on make up while driving. It would save alot of lives, traffic jams, and productive man hours in which i could be doing something else in my car other than driving. This will also save alot of lives for whatever country can fast track it into military use.

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Jedigeek93

07/22/10 at 12:46 pm

I'm sort of exited and terrified of driverless cars. On one hand I don't have to drive, and neither do any other texting, drunk, of just bad drivers in general, but at the same time, something like this would have to be bug-proof or people could get seriously hurt

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saiganeshb

07/23/10 at 10:53 pm

I am assuming the system uses some machine learning techniques to navigate the whole route. How many cameras are being used and are neural networks involved ? The fact that technology has come so far to to enable driving at a decent speed in real world conditions and real time using artificial intelligence is truly fascinating.8000 miles shows great confidence in the accuracy of the system! Is there any paper published on this btw?

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Moezart

08/03/10 at 1:07 pm

It would be nice if we could actually do something in the US. What do we do here now? Science wait no that done at the new collider in the UK, computers no comment, robotics what’s that? Manufacturing know where I can find a job, well there don’t seem to be much left. Maybe the unemployment office is hiring, I here they’ve have been getting a lot of business.