autonomous driving

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that ended on February 19th 2007, Sebastian Thrun, the father of “Stanley” made a bold prediction that autonomous highway driving will be possible within a decade and cars will be smart enough to maneuver through city traffic in 25 years.

For autonomous driving, the artificial intelligence system has to be made sophisticated enough to recognize and understand objects before the vehicle should actuate. “Stanley”, the winner of the 2005 Grand Challenge Race, is equipped with laser range finders, radars, cameras and a monocular vision system. The robot sees a bi-colored 3D image and knows how its surrounding environment looks like.

Dr. Simon Lucas of the Department of Computer Science at University of Essex (United Kingdom) is doing autonomous driving research on model cars. Robotic cars navigating across the Mohave Desert by themselves surely attracts many media eyeballs and sponsors with fat wallets. “But by using model cars, we will be able to investigate the possibilities of the technology far easier and more cheaply.”--Dr. Lucas said.

An autonomous model car race will take place in the summer of 2007 on Colchester campus at University of Essex. waziwazi.com will be at this event to keep everyone posted. After this warm-up session, autonomous model cars built by researchers across the world will have a final rally at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong in 2008.

In the wake of winning the 2005 Grand Challenge, VW is trying to woo us again with Stanley's little sister--Herbie '53 plus 1' fully loaded, but this time without Hollywood.

The basic anatomy on Herbie is quite similar to that of Stanley's--radar and laser sensor (multi-plane scanner) for close range sensing and a satellite navigation system to define the travel route. I wonder if the ERL is playing any part in this project. ... continued