New Post has been published on SciTech Online Magazine
New Post has been published on http://scitechnews.co.uk/ev-hybrid/v-charge-the-car-that-drives-and-parks-itself/
V-Charge: the car that drives and parks itself!
Project V-Charge is almost complete, as a research consortium in Europe build a robot car.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Meet the car that will pick you and your friends up, drive to desired location – and park up too! All by itself. Like a taxi without the driver, if you will.
And If you hadn’t sussed it out already – the project is named V-Charge because these things charge themselves.
Performance isn’t quite top notch in its current condition, so if you hoped to make it to that work do on time then you may be disappointed. But Paul Furgale of ETH Zurich, the scientific director of the project, is pretty convinced it will reach the market soon and would still attract interest despite its sluggish pace.
The car is capable of responding to commands via an app on your smartphone – if that wasn’t ‘robot’ enough for you!
Cheap ‘near market’ sensors, including compact LIDAR units, allow these robots to steer in more limited areas where GPS signal can’t be reached. Suppliers like Vimeo and Ibeo expect to sell these units for less than 300 dollars, come 2016.
But watch out for pedestrians!
“Pedestrians behave quite unpredictably in areas where cars are driving slowly,” Furgale highlighted. “There are many objects around, and the car needs to be able to figure out whether these objects are static or moving and in what directions are they moving.”
More research needs doing. At the moment, researchers are testing Volkswagen Polo’s equipped with 8 cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors.
We can’t be far off until Project V-Charge is finally complete.
So a word to all you drivers out there: take a back seat for once and let the car do its thing!
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/euro-robotaxis-will-park-and-charge-all-by-themselves
Source Image: http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/euro_ecar_selfparking_blogpic-1418223026408.jpg