Autonomous Vehicle Could Reach Roads Soon

Sensors, computers enable vehicle to brake, steer and avoid obstacles by itself

Charles J. Murray, Senior Technical Editor -- Design News, March 17, 2008

Automotive engineers at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas declared completely autonomous cars could be ready as soon as 2020.

Demonstrating the winning vehicle from DARPA's 2007 Urban Challenge, engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, Continental Automotive Systems, Caterpillar Inc. and General Motors Corp. said the technology will begin as an adjunct to drivers of production vehicles, but will eventually become completely autonomous over the next 10 to 15 years.

“There's a lot of computing power on board, but from a production (integration) standpoint, we can eliminate a lot of the computing systems and sensors,” says Bakhtiar Litkouhi, manager of vehicle control systems for GM's Electrical and Controls Integration Lab. “We can clearly see an evolutionary path to full autonomous vehicles.”

Known as “Boss,” the demonstration vehicle at CES won the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) 60-mile Urban Challenge race in November. The high-tech Chevrolet Tahoe employs LIDAR, radar, GPS and a computing platform that's essentially a “supercomputer on wheels” to autonomously brake, steer, accelerate and “see” obstacles in the road.

GM engineers at the show said the vehicle is more than a glitzy technical curiosity. “It's aligned with our vision,” Litkouhi says. “It's very important from a customer and safety point of view.”

According to Litkouhi, 75 percent of today's accidents are caused by driver behavior. Meanwhile, roads are getting more crowded and today's total of 850 million vehicles is expected to grow to more than a billion as China and India begin to buy more cars in the next decade.

Vehicles such as Boss could help solve the problem by taking driver behavior out of the picture. The prototype vehicle incorporates technology from a wide variety of sensor manufacturers and computer companies. A rotating LIDAR system from Velodyne is mounted atop it. It also employs Continental radar systems and planar lasers from Sick Optic, along with three GPS antennae on the roof. Inside, it uses a CompactPCI chassis packed with 10 computing blades, each containing an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 10 GBytes of memory.

“You have the equivalent of about 20 laptop processors working in there,” says Bob Bittner, Tartan Racing test lead for Carnegie Mellon.




	"Boss" employs Continental Automotive radar systems and planar lasers from Sick Optic, along wtih three GPS antennae on the roof.

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