Between July last year and October two electrically powered freight carrying vehicles made the 13,000+ kilometre trip between Parma, Italy and Shanghai, China with only a tiny amount of human interference. The scheme was called the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (details here) and was devised with help from the European Union EUREKA Prometheus Project, by VisLab, a brainchild of the University of Parma, which has been pushing the boundaries of automatic vehicle control for over two decades. This feat is just the latest in a series of research projects by various universities such as the AutoNOMOS by the Freie Universität Berlin artificial intelligence department and the Carnegie Mellon University which, in conjunction with General Motors, won the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge prize…
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