Van without man drives from Italy to China

Parma based VisLab (University of Parma’s Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory) has sent an orange van equipped with sensors, cameras and heavy computer gear on a 13,000 km test drive to China.
The expected amount of collected data, between 50 - 100 terrabytes, will provide breakthrough information to improve and perfect current navigation systems in order to implement them in commercial use.

From IEE Spectrum:
Two vans travel in line. The first uses maps and GPS to drive itself whenever possible, but a human driver is in control most of the time. The second van uses its cameras and navigation system to follow the first; it visually tracks the lead van, plans a trajectory in real time, and generates controls for steering and accelerating or braking. A key piece of software is the one that processes the 180-degree frontal view.
Sponsored by the European Research Council, a group of 20 staff researchers and students travel in a convoy that includes four vans (two pairs of leader-follower vehicles) and six support trucks, which provide a mechanic shop, storage, accommodation, and satellite communications.
The vans are fully electric, and the researchers drive them in the morning, recharge in the afternoon, drive some more, and recharge again overnight.

“When you do things in the lab, it all really works. But when you go out in a real road, with real traffic, real weather, it’s another story,” says Alberto Broggi, VisLab's director and an engineering professor at Parma University.
Even with all the planning, some problems are unpredictable. To cross the Russian border the group was held for 22 hours by custom officers, who took a huge number of pictures of the vehicles and the equipment and demanded a pile of paperwork. During a recent stretch of the trip, the convoy found itself in the middle of the notoriously bad traffic of Moscow. Because of the congestion, a two-lane road had three rows of cars. The van's system insisted in staying on its lane, so the researchers had to turn to manual driving.

The group is now about halfway through their trip, which started in July and will end in late October, at the 2010 World Expo in China.

Follow the orange van live: http://viac.vislab.it/?page_id=152
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/autonomous-vehicle-driving-from-italy-to-china