SEMI-AUTONOMOUS VANS TRAVELING FROM ITALY TO CHINA
FLOPPY DRIVE GROWS LEGS TO AVOID SPILLS, STILL CAN’T AVOID EXTINCTION — ENGADGET
July 21, 2010EDUDEMIC » HOW TWITTER HELPS RESEARCHERS VISUALIZE THE MOODS OF AMERICANS
July 22, 2010A pair of robotic vehicles from Vislab (artificial vision and intelligent systems lab at the University of Parma) departed Parma, Italy on Tuesday for Shanghai, China. The 100% electric vans will travel 8,000 miles over three months, enduring (hopefully) all kinds of extremes ranging from the downtown Moscow to the Gobi desert, which I’m pretty sure is full of dinosaurs or something.
Now, I’m calling these vans semi-autonomous because they’re autonomously following a vehicle that’s being driven by a human. Not that this is an easy task, of course… The vans have been kitted out with the same sort of obstacle detection and avoidance tech as the DARPA Grand and Urban challenge vehicles.
At this point, this technology is targeted mostly at goods transport as opposed to letting you take a nap while your car drives you somewhere. Some people, though, don’t really get why this sort of thing is useful or important:
“It begs the question why. In Australia, you have big trucks with three or four trailers attached in the desert. Why do you need an autonomous vehicle if you can connect them with a piece of steel?” said Andrew Close, an analyst at IHS Automotive.
Well, there’s a reason why that type of thing works in Australia and nowhere else: in Australia, you have a bajillion miles of long, flat, empty road. Most states in the US, on the other hand, limit connected trailers to two. Giving autonomy (or optional semi-autonomy) to vehicles means that you can have as many trailers as is reasonable or convenient. And really, it’s the optional semi-autonomy that’s the most realistically valuable in the short term, as we’ve discussed before. Think about it: on the highway, you spend a LOT of time doing nothing except following the guy in front of you, slowing down when he does and not going outside the lines. It’s pretty robotic, right? Right? Yeah. And pretty soon, your car will be better than you are at avoiding the unexpected. Autonomous driving: it saves time, it saves money, and it will most likely save lives.
