The "road trip" is the brainchild of VisLab, the "Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory" of the Parma University in Italy which is involved in basic and applied research developing machine vision algorithms and intelligent systems for the automotive field. Vislab plans to participate in the Expo in China through its latest project, VIAC, partially funded by the ERC (European Research Council) that aims to demonstrate that it is possible, although in a prototype version, to move goods between two continents with non-polluting vehicles powered by green energy and with virtually no human intervention. Some goods have already been packed into the vans in Rome ahead of this morning's start while some more goods will be collected throughout the trip, and finally taken to Shanghai on vehicles with no driver for the first time in history.

The World Expo 2010, being held in Shanghai this year, is the third most relevant worldwide event after the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, 70 million visitors from all over the world are expected to visit the Expo. This year’s theme is “better cities, better life”; issues related to sustainable mobility are indeed central to the Expo, which will be a display of new ideas developed worldwide in this field.

The start of the VIAC event involved an official presentation in Milan on Tuesday. A number of dignitaries and interested people attended the presentation held just in front of the Milan Cathedral. After the presentation a VIAC vehicle was used to automatically transport officials of the Expo 2015 and Centro Studi Grande Milano around the cathedral area. Today the fleet of vehicles will set off for Shanghai, the starting ceremony set to be presided over by the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The aim of the long journey will be to demonstrate, through an extensive and impressive test, that current technology is mature enough for the deployment of non-polluting and non-oil based autonomous vehicles in real conditions. Moreover the Municipality of Rome, an active player in this project, is planning to exploit these vehicles downtown to deliver goods to shops, collect refuse, and arrange sustainable mobility in the last mile.

Two electric vehicles will perform the 13,000 km trip mainly powered by solar energy, with no driver; two backup vehicles will be part of the trip as well. As a support, four "Overland" expedition trucks will follow the journey to provide a mechanics' workshop, storage areas and accommodation; finally two additional trucks will be used for media coverage and will be equipped for live satellite broadcasting. The first vehicle will drive autonomously during selected sections of the trip and will conduct experimental tests on sensing, decision, and control subsystems, and will continuously collect data. Although limited, human interventions will be needed to define the route and intervene in critical situations. The second vehicle will automatically follow the route defined by the preceding vehicle, requiring no human intervention (100 percent autonomous). This will be regarded as a readily exploitable vehicle, able to move on predefined routes; at the end of the trip, its technology will be transferred to a set of vehicles to move in the inner part of Rome in the close future.

In case the first vehicle is in line of sight, the second will follow using primarily vision; in case the first vehicle is not visible (cut off by another vehicle behind a curve, far ahead), the the second vehicle will use GPS info broadcasted by the first vehicle to determine a rough indication of the route. In any case, local sensing will be the primary means of avoiding obstacles, locating the road and the path (when driving off-road), locating other traffic, and - in general - understand the environment. During the trip, demonstrations will be performed in specific hot spots; autonomous vehicles will follow given routes, negotiating traffic, avoiding obstacles, and stopping when required.

This is a unique and ambitious test that follows other events which were similar in nature: vehicles have been demonstrated to be able to move in unknown and extreme environments like the Mojave Desert in Nevada/California back in 2005 during the DARPA Grand Challenge; vehicles showed excellent performance when driving downtown in 2007 during the DARPA Urban Challenge. Autonomous vehicles demonstrated great potential, but so far all these tests were conducted in fairly simplified scenarios (with no other traffic in the first case, and with well structured rules in the latter). Other groups are now trying different extreme tests, such as the equipment of a vehicle to drive a rally race. With this event we would like to test and stress our technology on a route that is long (13,000 km) and extreme (including all sort of traffic, weather conditions, road infrastructures, and even off-road) to really assess the performance of our systems.

There’s no trick: there are rules, instead. Since there are no maps of some of the areas in which the vehicles have to move, it would be impossible to ask the vehicles to determine the route. Therefore the convoy is led by a vehicle in which operators take control every time a decision on the road has to be taken. This is the leader vehicle; it is manned all the time, although it runs autonomously most of the time. It is used to test innovative systems and conduct experiments. The leader also broadcasts its GPS position via radio. The second vehicle, i.e. the follower, receives the leader’s GPS position; this vehicle follows the leader’s route defined by very rough GPS waypoints (remember hat DGPS is not available in many areas) and refines its trajectory via local sensing. If a map would be available, there would be no need for a leader. The second vehicle is readily exploitable as a fully autonomous vehicle.

The choice to use small vehicles was taken simply because they are a must for inner city applications. Electric propulsion is a key to sustainable mobility. Pulling the two factors together results in a straightforward choice for this kind of demonstration. Indeed, a 13,000 km extreme trip like VIAC is not a good representation of inner city mobility, but if the vehicles survive, VisLab will be sure that they will survive in future urban applications too. In other words, they are pushing this technology to check its limits. The vehicles' performance is the same as the ones of the original vehicles: about a 100 km range and a 60 km/h top speed. The solar panel on the roof will be used to power the autonomous driving system only, not the batteries. Therefore cameras, lasers, PCs, and actuators will allbe  powered by green energy, making the autonomous driving technology self-sustainable. The ‘autonomous driver’ is therefore seen as a plug-in that is completely decoupled form the vehicle system and can be virtually adapted and installed on any vehicle.