Global General

Italy to China in driverless vehicles

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-07-20 23:00

"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.

Close said he expected it to take at least a decade before a convoy of driverless vehicles following a lead would be ready to hit the road on a transport job. Broggi said driverless vehicles are probably 20 years away.

But elements of the technology could find applications much quicker.

Related readings:  GM envisions driverless cars on horizon  Scientists: Robot-driven cars on roads by '30

For example, the scanners being tested could soon allow farmers to program tractors to plow and seed fields through the night, Broggi said. Vislab is also working with Caterpiller Inc., to develop unmanned vehicle technology for extreme environments, like mining.

"We would like now to do a long experiment and try this technology for 24 hours a day, with diverse temperatures and traffic, to see if our systems recognize these situations," Broggi said.

A test drive off campus on Thursday illustrates the many hazards. A tractor trailer blocked visibility entering a busy traffic circle, forcing the lead vehicle to inch tentatively into oncoming cars. When it did find a break, there wasn't enough time for the second vehicle to follow before another car inserted itself between them, cutting off communication. The technician aboard the second vehicle had no choice but to hit manual and start driving.

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.

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 a passenger car to allow drivers stuck in traffic jams to sit back and read the newspaper, Broggi said.

"This is a study that will bring us closer to that day," said automotive analyst Close.

The vehicles travel at a maximum 50 or 60 kilometers an hour (30 or 37 miles an hour), and must be recharged for a full eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. They expect to get in four hours a day of driving. The idle pair will be carried along the route on a truck.

One of the many challenges facing the team will be to find places to recharge the vehicles in remote areas of Siberia and Mongolia. Just in case, they have packed gasoline-powered generators.

The journey will be filmed by a group of Italian vehicle adventurers and also streamed onto Vislab's Web site.

The project has been funded with a euro1.8 million ($2.3 million) grant from the European Commission's European Research Council, and Vislab has technical sponsors including Piaggio, which has provided the Piaggio Porter vans.