Winning the Oil Endgame

Creating driverless vehicles is about solving a robotics problem: expressing the urban driving behaviour in machines. Understanding the energy issues related to current oil based vehicles is a separate but interesting topic.
This presentation discuss the ultra-light carbon based vehicles, that allow new designs and new economics for deploying next generation vehicles.

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Do not think this as a vehicle with chips, it's a computer with wheels.
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Winning the Oil Endgame: Amory Lovins

Cars, trucks and planes lie at the heart of Amory Lovins plan for kicking the oil habit. "We must make all our vehicles both lighter and stronger, using composite materials; more aerodynamic; and capable of running on biofuels," says Lovins. We could cut oil use in half by 2025, and by 2040, oil use could be zero, he states. It's a $180-billion-dollar investment with handsome returns.
Lovins marshals many arguments against the skeptics. First, much of the technological know-how already exists to bring affordable, ultralight advanced composite vehicles to market.

See the video.

More information is available in the online book Wining the Oil EndGame.

SmartTer

The vehicle called SmartTer (Smart all Terrain Vehicle) is based on a standard Smart car that has been enhanced for fully autonomous driving in somewhat flat outdoor environments. It is equipped with two frontal SICK laser scanner sensors for obstacle avoidance and local navigation, a rotating SICK (3D) and omnidirectional camera for 3D mapping, an inertial measurement system (IMU) for motion and pose estimation and a GPS system as absolute reference. The SmartTer is intended to establish a fully 3D map (using the 3D laser and omni-came images) while fully autonomously driving along the ELROB 2006 route. The navigation tasks (local planning, obstacle avoidance, vehicle control) are expected to run in real time at update rates of around 10-30 Hz. The 3D map will be updated around once every second, enabling for global path planning and object recognition (scene analysis) at reasonably high rates.

The development of the SmartTer has been started in October. The system with all sensors is expected to be ready by the end of march. Real world testing with all basic functionalities is planned for April 2006. The final demonstration will take place on May the 15th at the ELROB challenge.

Toward 2015

The US Congress has mandated that one third of the US military's ground vehicles must be able to operate autonomously by 2015.

In the meantime specially conceived driverless vehicles could be operational as soon as 2008.

Enjoy the videos here and here.

The Grand Odyssey

One hour video telling the story behind the news event.