University of Essex

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.