Video cameras help guide the unmanned vehicles developed by Italian company VisLab. (Antonio Calanni / The Associated Press)PARMA, Italy -- It's a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey halfway around the world -- but is anyone at the controls?
A team of Italian engineers have launched what has been billed as the longest-ever test-drive of driverless vehicles: an 8,000-mile, three-month road trip from Italy to China, not in search of silk, but to test the limits of automotive technology.
Project leader Alberto Broggi sits in one of the driverless vehicles last month in Parma, Italy. Two of the vans recently set out on an 8,000-mile test drive of unmanned vehicles. (Antonio Calanni / The Associated Press)
Two bright-orange vehicles, equipped with laser scanners and cameras that work in concert to detect and help avoid obstacles, are to brave the traffic of Moscow, the summer heat of Siberia and the bitter cold of the Gobi desert before their planned arrival in Shanghai at the end of October.
"What we are trying to do is stress our systems and see if they can work in a real environment, with real weather, real traffic, crazy people who cross the road in front of you and a vehicle that cuts you off," says project leader Alberto Broggi.
The road trip consists of two pairs of vehicles, each pair consisting of a driven lead van followed by a driverless vehicle occupied by two technicians. Their job is to fix glitches and take over the wheel in case of an emergency.
The driverless vehicle takes cues from the lead van but will have to respond to any ordinary obstacles or dangers. The two pairs will alternate stretches along the route to China.
Online
- Follow the trip from Italy to China at VisLab's website: viac.vislab.it
- Read more about the Stanford project: me.stanford.edu/groups/design/automotive
- U.S. vehicle also up for a challenge
- A team of Stanford University researchers is also working on driverless technology: a self-driving car named Shelley will scale Colorado's Pikes Peak next month. The team's goal is to develop a car that can drive at high speeds under extreme conditions.
- That technology could one day be used to create "smarter" cars that help motorists avoid accidents when they're driving fast, says researcher Christian Gerdes. At Pikes Peak, Shelley will climb 4,721 feet on paved and gravel roads as it covers a 12.4-mile race course with 156 turns. The feat has never been attempted by an autonomous vehicle.
There are several possible applications for the technology developed by the University of Parma's Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (VisLab), run by Broggi. Such a convoy formation could one day be used to caravan trucks across long distances, and is a highly sought-after military application that would expose fewer soldiers to risk in hostile environments.
In ordinary life, the technology might one day be used in passenger cars to allow drivers stuck in traffic jams to sit back and read the newspaper, Broggi says.
It could be a decade or two before we see driverless convoys on the roads, the researchers say, but elements of the technology could find applications much quicker.
For example, the scanners being tested could soon allow farmers to program tractors to plow and seed fields through the night, Broggi says. VisLab is also working with Caterpillar to develop unmanned-vehicle technology for extreme environments, such as mining.
Failure is part of the plan. The goal is to determine precisely the situations where the technology does not work -- and fine-tune it using 100 terabytes of information that will be gathered along the journey.
"We would like now to do a long experiment and try this technology for 24 hours a day," Broggi says, "with diverse temperatures and traffic, to see if our systems recognize these situations."
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