[Quietcars] Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China

[Jewel S.]

Ok, I'm not sure about this...it seems really scary, actually. And
inconvenient! Recharging every 2 to 3 hours for 8 hours, and a max
speed of 38 mph? I'm not going anywhere with that!

I'm sure this is just the start though.

On 10/29/10, Chip Hailey <chiphailey at cableone.net> wrote:
> Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China
> Email this Story
> Oct 28, 7:45 AM (ET)
> By ELAINE KURTENBACH
> SHANGHAI (AP) - Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi
> Desert - it
> certainly was a long way to go without getting lost.
> Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile
> (13,000-kilometer)
> test drive from Italy to China - a modern-day version of Marco Polo's
> journey around
> the world - with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.
> The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven
> video cameras
> that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment
> aimed
> at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.
> The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes
> in road,
> traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for
> further
> research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.
> "We didn't know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we
> would
> have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy
> drivers or
> regular drivers, so we encountered the lot," said Isabella Fredriga, a
> research engineer
> for the project.
> Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as
> passengers
> just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few
> times
> - when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll
> stations.
> The project used no maps, often traveling through remote regions of Siberia
> and China.
> At one point, a van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.
> A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle
> and Lane
> Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically
> adjusted the
> vehicles' speed and direction.
> "This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and
> the steering
> wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and
> avoid obstacles
> with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in
> Italy, the
> lead researcher for the project.
> "The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents,
> in different
> states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different
> infrastructure.
> Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on," he
> said.
> The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities.
> It also
> could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers
> said.
> The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per
> hour)
> and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of
> driving.
> At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due
> to human
> error, Fredriga said.
> "There were a few scary moments. Like when the following vehicle bumped into
> the
> leading one and that was just because we forgot, we stopped and we forgot to
> turn
> the system off," Fredriga said.
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-- 
~Jewel
Check out my blog about accessibility for the blind!
Treasure Chest for the Blind: http://blindtreasurechest.blogspot.com