what you are looking at is a low-speedelectric vehicle frame with 3d printed body panels.hopefully we'll release asmall fleet of these for on-campus travel so if you need to go from northcampus to central campus or just between buildings far away or maybethere is some vips that we want to impress so we dial up an automated golf cart to come pick them up. being able to 3d print cars allows us to experiment with the shape of the vehicle.how do we make the vehicle inviting? how do we, sort of, make the vehicle tell the storythat "hey, i'm an autonomous vehicle come and ride on me!". i am putting the steering wheel on because it's not self-driving yet so in order to move it backto the lab we have two shamefully put
the steering wheel back on.this is our first autonomous low-speed electric vehicle. we envision in twoor three years that we might have a fleet of fifty or a hundred of theseguys zipping around campus and just basically serving as a force multiplierfor the bus system that we have on campus. wait... guys, is there a serviceelevator that's big enough for this? (grumbling) so a lot of people talk aboutintelligent transportation systems that are a bit like using uber where you pull out yourphone and an autonomous car comes and picks you up. how does an autonomous car figure out whoon the side of the road called it? how does it identify a safe place to pullover? the goal of this project is really
to tackle the transportation systemchallenges in order to turn it into a viable economically and sociallyacceptable transportation system. we've got a team of about sixteen people and it'sreally important to locate the team physically close to where you're testing.we started working at mcity yesterday morning this gives us a reallycontrolled test environment that is huge for rapid development. one of thedisadvantages is that there isn't any actual structure at mcity like interms of contained buildings with running water and so we are in ashipping container with a porta-potty but that's what it takes to get acool test facility like this then so be it.
alright are you ready? i'm going to drawa route for the vehicle to take, hand-free. we spent basically the first month just trying toget the vehicle to turn the steering wheels and apply the throttle and thebrake when we wanted it to. i think the hardest technical challenges for us to solve is the localization problem. being able to keep track of where the vehicleis with respect to the roadway and which lane we're in and all those sorts of things.we've got a gps system and that's aided by encoders on the wheels and a fiberoptic gyro in the back seat we also have a laser based localizationsystem that is building a 3d map of the vehicle around us and then the thirdmethod that we're looking at is using
radio beacon transponders so later todaywe're going to be populating about 50 beacons all-around mcity. it's notpractical to instrument the whole world with hundreds of beacons but what we could dois on a scale of like a campus-wide navigation system it is practical onthat scale. for a transportation on demand systemlike this to be really successful it's going to require a lot of people to worktogether. if we're successful though i
local motors 3d printed car,think there's a huge upside in terms ofsocial and economic benefits. jinsang kim told me he had some kind of super coolliquid so i'm out here to ask him what makes that liquid so cool? when professor jinsang kim and his team first made the new
molecule, they found that it can beeither a liquid or ...
