Driverless Vans Travel From Italy to China

The Escapist

The whole "driverless cars" idea is really taking off. The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that four driverless vans successfully completed a 8,100-mile (13,000-kilometer) trek from Italy to China this week, with only minimal human intervention.

The vehicles were equipped with solar-powered laser scanners and video cameras that work together to detect obstacles.

According to the Herald:

A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analysed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction.

"This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.

"The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents, in different states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different infrastructure. Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on," he said.