Today marks the start of a remarkable robocar trek from Italy to China. The team from the Vislab International Autonomous Challenge start in Italy and will trek all the way to Shanghai in electric autonomous vehicles, crossing borders, handling rough terrain and going over roads for which there are no maps in areas where there is no high-accuracy GPS.

This would be impossible today so they are solving that problem by having a lead car which drives mostly autonomously, but sometimes has the humans take over, particularly in areas where there are no maps. This vehicle can be seen by the other vehicles and also transmits GPS waypoints to them, so they can follow those waypoints and use their sensors to fill in the rest. The other vehicles also will have humans to correct them in case of error, and the amount of correction needed will be recorded. Some of the earliest robocar experiments in Germany used this approach, driving the highways with occasional human correction. (The DARPA grand challenges required empty vehicles on a closed course, and no human intervention, except the kill switch, was allowed.) This should be a tremendous challenge with much learned along the way about what works and what doesn't. As a computer vision lab, these cars appear to want to use vision a lot more than other robocars, which have gone LIDAR all the way. (There are LIDARs on the Vislab cars, but not as fancy as the 64 line Velodyne.)

They are using electric cars to send a green message. While I do believe that the robocars of the future will indeed be electric, and that self-recharge is a cruicial element of the value of robocars, I am not as fond of this decision. "One thing at a time" is the philosophy that makes sense, so I think it's better to start with proven and easy to refuel gasoline cars and get the autonomy working, then improve what's underneath. But this is a minor quibble about an exciting project.

They have a live tracking tool (not up yet) and a blog you can follow.

More robocar news to come. Yesterday I had an interesting ride in Junior (Darpa Grand Challenge II winner) and we trusted it enough to have Kathryn stand in the crosswalk while Junior drove up to it, then stopped and waited for her to walk out of it.