In June we have Dr. Tyler Folsom coming up from Seattle to talk about the open source Elcano project that he's involved in to build practical autonomous robotic cars. The Google self-driving car may be the best known but is far from the only project to automate our automobiles and now you can even take an on-line course about doing exactly that. What's it going to take before we can use driver-less cars?
Following the presentation we'll have round-the-room introductions and then open the floor for networking. Be sure to bring your business/contact cards and a story or two to share.
About the presentation:
Dr. Folsom will review the architecture of the system that they're building and point to web sites with open source hardware and software. He'll show that the biggest barriers to deployment are not technical.
Research suggests that self-driving cars have the potential to achieve 0.25 l/100 km equivalent, eliminate urban electric vehicle range anxiety, cut accidents by a factor of 10, and blur the distinction between public and private transportation. And now that Nevada has opened the door to licensing autonomous vehicles, perhaps we'll can start to realize their potential.
About the speaker:
Dr. Folsom specializes in the areas of Computational Intelligence, Embedded Systems and Machine Vision. He has 6 years of teaching and 19 years of engineering and programming experience and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Washington. He has designed both software and hardware for industrial microcomputer inspection and control systems and has used neural network and standard image processing techniques for machine vision systems.
For more information:
- Wikipedia Autonomous Car: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car
- Nevada Licenses Driverless Cars: http://www.techspot.com/news/48497-nevada-embraces-driverless-cars-issues-autonomous-vehicle-licenses.html
- The Open Source Elcano Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/urbanchallenge/
- Udacity's Programming A Robotic Car course: http://www.udacity.com/course/cs373
- Environmental Seminar on Transportation: http://www.enviroteach.com/Transportation.html
- Directions and parking: http://robsonsquare.ubc.ca/find-us/
Comments