La route automatisée

Cycabs in urban environment

2007-01-26T00:24:00.001-08:00

Very nice work from the french GRAVIR team, this is one of the results of the Mobivip project.

Driverless transport in big cities

2006-08-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Cybercars in the news...

"While traffic problems in major cities have been familiar for a long time, the measures needed to deal with them have still to be put into effect. However, in its 6th Framework Programme, the EU is beating the big drum and looking for more efficient transport solutions in big cities, as well as more rational use of motor traffic. New traffic solutions such as completely automated vehicles moving on tracks, cars in defined corridors (cybercars) and bi-modal vehicles that can alternate between automatic and manual control, will aim to reduce traffic queues and pollution."

Winning The DARPA Grand Challenge

2006-08-05T09:36:00.000-07:00


Google TechTalks August 2, 2006 Sebastian Thrun ABSTRACT The DARPA grand challenge, technical details enabling Sebastian Thrun's win, and an introduction to the next phase called "The Urban Grand Challenge".

Smart cars to rule the roads

2006-07-21T00:49:00.000-07:00

Smart cars to rule the roads: "It's been more than 20 years since Knight Rider hit the airwaves, but the next generation of KITT-style cars may be seen on freeways very soon. The next generation of autonomous 'smart cars' is now on the agenda for both military and high-end automobile manufacturers, according to a report from the recent RoboBusiness conference. Smart cars would be able to recognize their occupants, understand driver and passenger needs and inform the driver how best to proceed."

Inside Stanley

2006-07-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

6 pages + 41 pages = 47 pages about Stanley !

Getting serious about Fuel Cells

2006-06-24T06:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a one hour presentation about Fuel Cells and Portable Power Solutions for cars.

Nissan Pivo

2006-06-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

A concept car. Drive by wire, four wheels steering, 100Km@60MilesPerHour. Future cars will be easier to be automated.

DARPA Grand Challenge 3

2006-05-03T01:54:00.000-07:00

DARPA announced the 3rd 'Grand Challenge, The DARPA Urban Challenge.
'To succeed, vehicles must autonomously obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles.' This year's new twist is two tracks for entry: the first is the same as the previous two challenges (develop on your own without Gov't. funding), but the second involves 'submitting a detailed proposal for up to $1 million of technology development funds.' Here is the PDF press release.

(from slashdot)

Winning the Oil Endgame

2006-04-30T15:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Quote:
"""
Do not think this as a vehicle with chips, it's a computer with wheels.
"""

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

2006-04-30T05:32:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-01T04:29:00.000-08:00

One hour video telling the story behind the news event.

Working on driverless vehicles

2006-03-19T07:08:00.000-08:00

Some great videos about what working on driverless vehicles is all about...

Driverless vehicles at IMARA

2006-03-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent video showing some capabilities of the new algorithms being developed.

Carbon fiber cars could put US on highway to efficiency

2006-03-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

Carbon fiber cars could put US on highway to efficiency

Highways of tomorrow might be filled with lighter, cleaner and more fuel-efficient automobiles made in part from recycled plastics, lignin from wood pulp and cellulose.
[...]

From PhysOrg.com.

Networks on wheels

2006-02-08T06:28:00.001-08:00

Networks on wheels: "More and more cars and trucks are equipped with some kinds of wireless networking devices, helping to create applications based on vehicle to vehicle communications. But these types of networks present some new security challenges because of the short contact times between different mobile nodes and of the large size of these networks. This is why Germany's funded Network on Wheels (NoW) project has decided to apply security considerations right at the beginning of the network development. Read more..."

Google Earth-VW plan navigation system

2006-02-07T00:20:00.000-08:00

CNN News: Google Earth-VW plan navigation system:
Monday, February 6, 2006; Posted: 11:45 a.m. EST (16:45 GMT)

(Reuters) -- Volkswagen of America Inc., said Friday it is working on a prototype vehicle which features Google Inc.'s satellite mapping software to give drivers a bird's eye view of the road ahead.

The two companies are working with the graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.to build an in-car navigation map system and a three-dimensional display so passengers can recognize where they are in relation to the surrounding topography.

See the full article.

New Honda Accord drives itself

2006-02-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

New Honda Accord drives itself: "Japanese car manufacturer Honda has launched a new self-driven car. Dubbed Honda Accord ADAS, the vehicle can change gear and steer itself around bends. While the auto-pilot function will currently only operate on motorways and dual carriageways, officials at Honda believe that future ADAS models will tackle all roads."

Putting pedestrian safety in the driving seat

2006-01-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

Every year in the European Union there are over 9,000 deaths and 200,000 injured victims in road accidents in which pedestrians and cyclists collide with a car. Hoping to improve on these grim statistics, is a cutting-edge sensing system that could ultimately help to save the lives of vulnerable road users (VRUs).

Read full text...

More information

Stackable smart robotic cars

2005-12-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working for several years with the famous architect Frank Gehry on a concept of smart, pollution-free and stackable cars that you could pick at a subway station or in an airport.

ZDnet
The Guardian
GM and Frank O. Gehry concept car

Britain Will Be First Country to Monitor Every Car Journey

2005-12-28T05:40:00.000-08:00

"""
From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored.
[...]
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
"""

read it

Ramp generates power as cars pass

2005-12-28T05:36:00.000-08:00

"Dorset inventor Peter Hughes' Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp creates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates. More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the £25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said."

This seems to be a viable solution to power smart infrastructure sensors.

Drivers getting cash for driving less

2005-12-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

A groundbreaking study is aimed at finding out if people will change their driving habits if they had to pay a toll for almost every mile they drive.

[read it]

What is going on with the electric vehicles ?

2005-11-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

You can get a good overview of the latest products here.

MIT talk: Vision-based robotics: Representation, Mapping and Exploration

2005-11-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

Speaker: Robert Sim, University of British Columbia
Date: Tuesday, November 22 2005

Autonomous mobile robot systems have an important role to play in a wide variety of application domains. A key component for autonomy is the capability to explore an unknown environment and construct a representation that a robotic agent can use to localize, navigate, and reason about the world. In this talk I will present results on the automatic construction of visual representations. First, the Visual Map representation will be introduced as a method for modelling the visual structure of the world. Second, I will present a flexible architecture for robust real-time vision-based mapping of an unknown environment. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of recent progress on the problem of autonomous robotic exploration, and illustrate issues in the problem of developing robotic explorers that are naturally curious about their environment.

The Visual Map framework is an approach to representing the visual world that enables a robot to learn models of the salient visual features of an environment. A key component of this representation is the ability to learn mappings between camera pose and image-domain features without imposing a priori assumptions about the structure of the environment, or the optical characteristics of the visual sensor. These mappings can be employed as generative models in a Bayesian framework for solving the robot localization problem, as well as for visual servoing and path planning.

The second part of this talk demonstrates an architecture for performing simultaneous localization and mapping with vision. The main goals of our work are to facilitate robust large-scale mapping in real time using vision. We employ a Rao-Blackwellised particle filter for managing uncertainty and examine a variety of robust proposal distributions, as well as the run-time and scaling characteristics of our architecture.

The latter part of this builds on representation and mapping to address robotic exploration. In order to acquire a representation of the world, a robot must first acquire data. From an information-theoretic point of view, this problem involves moving through the world so as to maximize the information that can be gained
from what is observed along the robot's trajectory. However, computing the optimal trajectory is complicated by several factors, including the presence of noise, the time horizon over which the robot plans, the specific objective function that is optimized, and the robot's choice of sensor. I will present several results in this area that lead to the development of robust robotic systems that can plan over the long term and successfully demonstrate an emergent sense of curiosity.

From passive applications to sentient machines (cooperative cars at IST)

2005-11-13T08:11:00.000-08:00

""""
.... results including one that showed how robotic devices could dynamically subscribe and unsubscribe from information resources as either information providers or information users.
"""

"""
The cooperating cars demonstration showed how vehicles could communicate with each other and react to each others' movements to avoid accidents.
""""

"""
The project results are being fed into a new IST initiative, HIDENETS, starting January 2006, which will involve an in-car electronics manufacturer (CARMEQ), industrial giant Fujitsu-Siemens and Telenor, a major Norwegian telecommunications company, in developing resilient
end-to-end solutions for distributed applications.
"""

Original news

Meet Klaus, the Volkswagen employee

2005-11-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

From 2002, but very interesting

3D cameras for Cycabs, dream or reality ?

2005-10-31T08:17:00.000-08:00

"""
UseRCams focuses on the development of an active 3D sensor, vital in providing improved obstacle detection and classification at short range.
"""

"""
The 3D camera has to be capable of delivering range images for a distance range of up to 20 m with a 3D image repetition rate of only a few milliseconds for the adaptation to the requirements of pre-crash and blind- spot surveillance.
""""

First post

2005-10-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

This blog could be used to post news about the activities inside the IMARA team, the LARA project and about driverless vehicles in general.