New Tech Europe | Jan 2017 | Digital Edition

Autonomous vehicles break through to the mainstream

Mark Patrick, Mouser Electronics

and saving EDF over €3m a year in running costs. Elsewhere in Europe two other mass transit autonomous systems are rolling out. The WEpod electric pods, designed by French manufacturer EasyMile for the Citymobil2 EU project, has already transported more 19,000 passengers in Vantaa, Finland, and Lausanne, Switzerland. And vehicles from Dutch system-maker 2getthere have also been on the road in the Dutch city of Masdar. These use virtual routes, defined in software, continuously calculating their position relative to their origin. The distance is measured by counting the number of wheel revolutions, and the position is calibrated using external reference points from simple, passive magnets embedded in the road surface. The small cylindrical magnets are spaced 2m apart and ensure the accuracy is within 2 cm on straight sections. This Free Ranging On Grid (FROG)

Australia and announced plans to lease driverless cars to the public in Gothenberg, Sweden. The converted Volvo XC90 cars are using the DRIVE PX2 embedded processing card from NVIDA with the latest Parker processor to handle the fusion of the sensor data from cameras, LiDAR and radar. The Parker chip combines two of NVIDIA’s second generation 64bit Denver ARM- based CPU cores paired with four 64- bit ARM Cortex A57 CPUs. These all work together to provide up to 1.5 Tflops of performance alongside 256 of the latest graphics processor units (GPUs). French start-up Navya rolled out its autonomous mass transit vehicle, carrying up to 16 people at a time around EDF’s nuclear power plant. The vehicle, also called Navya, uses two different types of LiDAR for detecting pedestrians and the road ahead. The shuttles run every three minutes, replacing several conventional busses

2016 has seen the breakthrough of driverless car and truck technology into mainstream use. After many years of Google testing its autonomous cars, major car makers have started testing their own engineering prototypes and regulators have been addressing the legislative challenges. This has also led to start-ups being acquired and new, unexpected players entering the market, such as ride-sharing pioneer Uber. The start of the year saw an A7 from Audi drive autonomously from San Francisco to Las Vegas, a 550-mile trip that kick-started the demonstration of driverless vehicles in the real world rather than the lab. January also saw Ford testing its autonomous engineering prototypes in Michigan in the snow, challenging the LiDAR laser and CMOS camera sensors to operate in highly reflective and dirty environments. Volvo also started trials in Western

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