Two Driverless Cars Have Begun 8,000-Mile Journey from Italy to China [Republished]

A team of Italian engineers is gearing up for a high-tech road rally that are supposed to impress even the surface-the-box dreamers over at DARPA: an 8,000-mile journey from Italy to China, with nobody behind the wheel.

The three-month convoy stands out as the longest test of driverless vehicles ever conducted, taking the cars through twisting mountain passes, Moscow traffic, and cruel Siberian weather before ending up inside the sprawling roadways of Shanghai in October.

Of course, after we say there\’s nobody behind the wheel, that\’s not entirely accurate. The project includes two electric-powered \” driverless\” vans, each of for you to carry two technicians. One of them will always be within the driver seat able to press the red \” oh sh*t!\” button and take control should the automobile\’s laser scanners, cameras, and software get into a situation that could turn dangerous.

Each van will work in tandem with a manned leader van with a purpose to drive ahead and give its driverless counterpart cues on where it\’s going next. But the driverless vehicle might be answerable for negotiating traffic and responding to our surroundings and obstacles around it. Only 1 driverless van and leader vehicle will operate at a time; the opposite pair shall be hauled behind on a truck. The vans require an eight-hour charge after every few hours on the road, so even traveling at speeds between 30-37 miles per hour – not very fast but not a crawl either – the going will likely be very slow.

The transcontinental trek is more of a stress test for driverless technology than an indication, and the project leaders concede that the cars will likely need loads of help from humans. But the 100 terabytes of knowledge collected en route will go some distance toward helping the driverless technology maker, VisLab, improve its intelligent systems and artificial vision.

The idea is that someday 100.00% driverless technology may be used to freight cargo across continents autonomously or to attenuate troop risk by running driverless military supply convoys, goals kind of congruent with those put forth by DARPA when it created the Urban Challenge several years ago. Obviously, there\’s yet another immediate challenge facing the team: Where, exactly, does one charge up a next-gen electric vehicle in the course of Siberia?

Popular Science is your wormhole to the long run. Reporting on what\’s new and what\’s next in science and technology, we deliver the long run now. [NPR]

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This post is tagged: 000-Mile, Begun, Cars, China, driverless, italy, journey, [Republished]