A giant leap for mankind was accomplished in a unique endeavor. Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and Gobi Desert, culminating at Shanghai Expo, four driverless electric cars completed an 8000 mile drive, akin to Marco Polo’s pioneering trip around the world. Four solar powered laser scanners and seven video cameras worked together to observe and avoid obstacles thus ensuring a safe journey all the way from Italy to China.
This experiment aims at creating awareness of road safety and improving automotive technology, which will provide a big fillip to this industry. The sensors provided human free navigation through varied diverse conditions of road, traffic and weather, thus collecting data for a later study by the European Research Council.
Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer reports that they faced all sorts of traffic and drivers lazy as well as regular. Researchers travelled as passengers in the vans for emergencies, like a Moscow traffic jam or toll stations, in which case they had to intervene. They covered remote regions of Siberia and China using no maps whatsoever.
Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector(GOLD), which is a computerized artificial vision system, used the sensor generated information, to regulate the speed and direction of the vans. Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma, in Italy, and lead researcher of this project says that the steering wheel controlled by the PC directed the van to follow the twists and turns of the road, avoiding obstacles. This experiment was to test the efficacy of the system on a long route which displayed diverse environmental conditions of two different continents and states including erratic climatic and road conditions. This will be used to compliment the driver’s abilities. The vehicles ran at top speeds of 38 miles and had to be recharged every four hours.
The system, though, worked without a hitch, and the few critical moments in between were caused by human error. Thus, this experiment paves the way for the systems of the future.
