VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, is the challenge conceived by
VisLab as an extreme test of
autonomous vehicles. It ran from July 20, 2010 to October 28, 2010, involving four
driverless vehicles driving with
virtually no human intervention on an almost trip from
Parma,
Italy to
Shanghai,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
.
["Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China"]
Elaine Kurtenbac, AP.COM
Jo Ling Kent, CNN.COM
Overview
The
2010 World Expo
Expo 2010, officially the Expo 2010 Shanghai China, was held on both banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China, from 1 May to 31 October 2010. It was a major World Expo registered by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), in the tr ...
's theme was “better cities, better life”; therefore issues related to sustainable mobility were central to the Expo and this challenge of reaching Shanghai with driverless vehicles provided a clear demonstration of future vehicles; it is considered one of the main milestones in
Robotics.
VisLab, thanks to a project partially funded by ERC -the
European Research Council
The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...
- showed that one day it will be possible to move goods between two continents with non-polluting vehicles powered by green energy and with virtually no human intervention. Goods were packed in
Parma and taken to
Shanghai on driverless vehicles for the first time in history.
The idea
The aim was to test and stress the current technology in a unique event: non-polluting and non-oil based
autonomous vehicles in real traffic conditions on an extreme journey between two continents, the final outcome being a huge dataset with a very large variety of situations to be further used to refine the onboard perception system.
Technical details
The trip traversed remote areas in Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, for which no map was available; due to the length of the trip it was also impossible to