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Nov 4, 2010

ELECTRIC VANS * China - Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China

Driverless Electric Vans, travels across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert to the Shanghai Expo site


Shanghai,China -AP Business, by Elaine Kurtenbach -Oct 28, 2010:  ...   Four driverless electric vans successfully ended an 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday... The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology...  
The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council... Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times — when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations...  A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction...  
The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities. It also could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers said... The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per hour) and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving...

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