{"id":143695,"date":"2014-01-31T14:35:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T16:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=143695"},"modified":"2017-03-09T17:48:14","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T20:48:14","slug":"driverless-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/driverless-car\/","title":{"rendered":"Driverless Car"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"On

L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span>On the USP campus in S\u00e3o Carlos, students take a backseat test drive in an autonomous carL\u00e9o Ramos<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Drivers in their seats free to read, doze off, access their smart phones or even play a video game? All the while inside a moving vehicle? That is the promise of the autonomous car, which is expected to go on the market in the next 10 or 20 years. Meanwhile, research efforts are underway in this area, especially at universities, at some companies in the automotive industry, and at Google, which also maintains an experimental project. In Brazil, a Palio Weekend Adventure vehicle owned by the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) was the first autonomous car authorized to travel on the streets of a city \u2014 S\u00e3o Carlos in S\u00e3o Paulo State \u2014 going a distance of 5.5 kilometers (km) in early October.<\/p>\n

The car, bought at a Fiat dealership, was outfitted with special equipment by a group of researchers from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Computation (ICMC) and the School of Engineering at the USP S\u00e3o Carlos campus. \u201cOne of today\u2019s major problems is that people are pressed for time and spend too many hours stuck in traffic especially in large cities,\u201d says Professor Denis Wolf of ICMC, coordinator of the Intelligent Robotic Car for Autonomous Navigation (Carina) project, which has funding from FAPESP and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), mainly through the National Institute of Science and Technology for Critical Embedded Systems (INCT-SEC).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are scientific studies showing that cars lined up in a row and traveling at the proper speed, automatically exchanging information with each other and with sensors on poles and in the ground which, in turn, communicate with the transit company, are able to increase the vehicular flow rate by up to three times on urban roads and non-urban highways. And this is only possible with autonomous cars,\u201d says Wolf. In a potential future of smart cities we might see traffic lights and road signs exchanging information with cars. Signals from Wi-Fi and satellite-based GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and from vehicles, mobile phones and other devices carried by the passengers of all the vehicles, including motorcycles, trucks and buses, would form a network of information that would create ideal conditions for everyone to travel more safely and faster.<\/p>\n

The technologies for this new world are being shaped now, as demonstrated by experiments such as those taking place at S\u00e3o Carlos and two other Brazilian universities: the Federal University of Esp\u00edrito Santo (UFES) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). The S\u00e3o Paulo team is made up of two professors, plus Wolf, and 15 master’s and doctoral students, in addition to a mechanic who is responsible for adapting the car. They developed the control system with command software, and created an innovation that is likely to be patented as soon as development is finished. It consists of an electric motor on the steering column that engages and magnetizes a mechanism that causes the car to move the steering wheel according to commands from the computers, of which there are two. One computer, which is installed in the trunk, has high processing capacity and an industrial design capable of withstanding vibrations and high temperatures. It receives information from external sensors such as lasers, cameras and a very advanced GPS system that indicates the vehicle\u2019s position on a map on a screen next to the driver. This processor tells the car what to do based on the information it receives and forwards it to another computer, a smaller one installed in the glove compartment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe smaller one controls the vehicle\u2019s hardware, for example, turning the steering wheel 10 degrees, or accelerating and braking,\u201d says Wolf. The brake has a mechanism called a linear actuator that activates a piston based on messages from the onboard computers. This system was designed by UFMG\u2019s autonomous vehicles research group. The gearshift is factory automated and changes gears as needed by the car’s engine. \u201cWe also developed a system, which has not yet been implemented, that shifts into reverse based on the software controlling the vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Ana Paula Campos<\/span><\/a>As safety is vital, the driver can at any time take over control of the car by pressing a button on the dashboard. This action switches off all the electronic systems that are not found in a conventional vehicle. With this, the driver is now in command. In the autonomous mode, the driver’s eyes are replaced by lasers and cameras that provide a 360\u00b0 view, similar to the system used by Google Street View, which makes it possible to identify a location on a map along with everything around it at locations that were previously filmed with a car owned by Google. There are two lasers, one in the front and one on the roof. Each one, also with a 360\u00b0 view, emits 700,000 beams of light per second to map everything within a radius of 50 meters, measuring the proximity of other cars, poles, people, dogs, signposts and any other obstacles. Each laser feeds back information on the angle and height of the obstacle in relation to the vehicle. \u201cThe lasers are invisible to the naked eye and are not harmful to human health,\u201d says Wolf. A stereo camera with two lenses operates with a laser installed in the front of the car and estimates the depth of anything around the car, in addition to interpreting and sending back information on the traffic lanes. \u201cAt this point we are in the midst of development, and for the time being the car stays within its own lane of the road, but soon we think the camera will be able to determine whether the lanes are single continuous or double lanes, plus recognize crosswalks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The route of the car is preset on the map shown on the monitor, but along the route it is possible for the driver to change it at will. In the future, information on traffic conditions may order route changes autonomously based on reports received by the vehicle from the transit company or highway administrator. Images on the monitor also display obstacles and people around the vehicle.<\/p>\n

The car, called the Carina II\u2014Carina I was an electric golf cart that ran only on the campus\u2014first traveled on USP campus roads in S\u00e3o Carlos in 2012, but in October of this year it moved onto city streets with the support of the city\u2019s department of transportation and transit, which removed other vehicles from the route and escorted it with two motorcycles. \u201cTo our knowledge this is the first test of an autonomous car on public roads in Latin America that involved obtaining all the necessary permits from the authorities,\u201d says Wolf, who has no funding or partnership with any automobile or auto parts company. \u201cWith funding from FAPESP and CNPq, we bought the car for R$50,000 in 2010. All the major equipment such as lasers and cameras was imported. The lasers cost R$110,000 and the 360\u00b0 camera over R$40,000, but import duties did not have to be paid because they were devices purchased via CNPq for research,\u201d says Wolf.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we still have a long way to go because our car still cannot overtake another car, and the speed is limited to 40 kilometers per hour (km\/h) for safety reasons,\u201d he says. The studies will become more advanced as we work with a group from Ohio State University (OSU) in the United States, through a project made possible by a cooperation agreement signed between FAPESP and the American university. \u201cThe Ohio group is more focused on electrical engineering and less on computers than we are. They have more than 15 years of experience and are more advanced in controls and instrumentation, but we are further ahead in the interpretation and processing of the images captured by cameras and sensors,\u201d he says. Even while working on the evolution of the system, the USP group has been recruited as a consultant to companies in the agricultural and heavy vehicle sectors, on projects about which entrepreneurs prefer not to comment.<\/p>\n

\"Denis

L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span>Denis Wolf, USP: autonomous cars could increase traffic flow in cities up to 300%.L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Even with so many projects, the S\u00e3o Carlos group is not the most famous in Brazil. The team led by Professor Alberto Ferreira de Souza of the High Performance Computing Laboratory (LCAD), of the UFES Information Technology Department, became well-known in Brazil by chance when they were involved in a minor accident with Ana Maria Braga, a Globo TV Network host, during a live program on the morning of April 22, 2013. After following the intended route in autonomous mode, the car unintentionally went into manual mode due to human error. With that, the vehicle moved\u2014the hand brake had not been set and the car was on a small incline\u2014so that an open door knocked Braga to the ground; she suffered minor injuries to her mouth and hands. \u201cWe were nervous because the program was live, and so we failed to follow the safety rules when we switched off the automatic system and went to manual operation,\u201d says De Souza. \u201cBut she handled it very well and was even worried about a potential negative impact on our project.\u201d But what happened was just the opposite, a lot more people became interested in learning about \u201cthe car that can drive itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UFES group, composed of three professors and nine master’s and doctoral students, developed the software that controls the car, but the focus of their long-term research is to understand how the human brain works in relation to visual cognition, in order that they can improve the car\u2019s vision. \u201cThe brain is able to create internal representations, such as, for example, measuring the volume of something. Some people can look at a piece of furniture and estimate its size. And tennis players must accurately calculate the speed of the ball and the position of the racket,\u201d says De Souza. \u201cIn the car, the universe is quite sophisticated because there are traffic lights, for example, and specific rules for everyone. We want to understand the neural models, not just the mathematics, of situations that indicate where the person is, in what place. But perhaps cars do not need to have as much information as we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

To carry this experiment forward, De Souza acquired, with funding from CNPq and the Esp\u00edrito Santo Research Foundation (FAPES), a hybrid Ford Escape vehicle from the United States. He hired an American company to modify the car, equipping it with mechanisms to control the steering wheel, brake, accelerator, gearshift and other instruments via computer, in addition to installing the 360\u00b0 view cameras and lasers. De Souza\u2019s team then developed the artificial intelligence software to control and navigate the autonomous car. So far, the vehicle has cost a total of R$500,000. In order to get it out and onto the streets, the car is waiting for bureaucratic problems such as license plates and other procedural matters to be resolved. Meanwhile, tests are being carried out on the UFES campus in Vit\u00f3ria. The ambitious goal of the group is, in 2014, to make the car go as far as Guarapari, 50 kilometers away, and advance their research on neural networks, especially in terms of understanding traffic rules.<\/p>\n

Unlike De Souza, who purchased a car in 2012 with the computer activated mechanisms already built in, the group led by Professor Guilherme Augusto Silva Pereira, who is with UFMG\u2019s Department of Electrical Engineering, began in 2007 to build an autonomous car from scratch. \u201cWith the help of the Minas Gerais Research Foundation (Fapemig), we bought the equipment such as lasers, stereo cameras and GPS, and we designed the installation of all the internal and external automation in such a way that the system can be installed in any vehicle,\u201d says Pereira. The car we used is a GM 2003 Astra, which was won as a prize from the manufacturer by another university group in a competition. Over the years, Pereira and his students have rebuilt the car\u2019s entire control architecture and developed a speed controller ranging from zero to 40 km\/h. \u201cThere already exist controllers that start at 30 km\/h. We made a new one because this equipment will be essential in autonomous cars of the future, when it will be necessary, in traffic, to go slower than 40 km\/h behind another vehicle with the aid of sensors.\u201d The UFMG Astra is also restricted to campus streets in Belo Horizonte. \u201cBecause the car was donated, it has no chassis number and cannot be registered,\u201d says Pereira.<\/p>\n