Translator: TED Translators admin Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning, my name is Alberto Broggi.
I am from the University of Parma,
where a couple years ago, we launched a spinoff
for the purpose of engineering the ideas we develop in the university context.
The title of today's presentation, as you might have noticed,
is "On Marco Polo's footsteps".
I hope the reason for this title will become evident
at the end of the presentation.
Anyhow, in order to introduce you to my work,
today I decided to begin from the end.
I'd like to show you a movie clip.
I'll start with this clip.
I'll ask you to give it a look and notice if there's anything odd in it.
Don't focus your attention on the blue car on the front,
look at what's happening in the car in the background.
It's a clip we shot three years ago.
It was one of the first videos
depicting our technology in action.
You'll notice there's no one in the car.
That's what our work is about, we are trying to eliminate the driver.
To tell you the truth, we also want to help the driver,
nonetheless, the final goal is to remove the driver.
Why are we attempting to do that?
In order to explain why we are working on this technology,
I have prepared a few numbers.
The first one: 40,000 people die each year on the European streets.
Yet, the most impressing data is that over 90% of those accidents
are due to human causes.
So the fault is not on the vehicles, it's on drivers that aren't able to drive,
or that drive under the influence, or that are distracted.
It's not a machine fault, it's an human fault.
What we are attempting to do
is to embed some intelligence into a vehicle,
so that it may help the driver or maybe someday replace the driver.
Therefore, in short,
our main objective is to increase road security.
That's one of the main goals, we also have many additional ones.
For instance, imagine a vehicle
that is able to move without having anybody on board,
that is without a driver;
such a vehicle could also be connected to other vehicles,
or to the road infrastructure,
from which it could also obtain information, such as a traffic map,
and that could, therefore, be able to select the best route available.
It could also be able to avoid traffic jams or accidents.
In short,
we could achieve a global optimization of the infrastructures.
We could obtain an increase of efficiency in terms of fuel consumption as well.
This vehicle is able to regulate its speed,
to choose the best speed, and the best route,
and so it is able to reach its destination in the shortest possible time.
Furthermore, such a vehicle could, for instance,
offer mobility to people that lack it,
such as elderly or young people who hasn't got a driving license yet.
Or people affected by some kind of mobility handicap.
I'll now show you where we have applied this technology so far.
Those are some of the vehicles on which we have implemented this technology
that enables the vehicle to move without having anybody on board.
We have implemented it on cars, motorcars,
trucks, heavy vehicles, and also on other types of vehicles.
Such as, for instance, farm tractors,
earth-moving vehicles, and road maintenance vehicles.
I'll make just one example.
Imagine having this technology on a farm tractor,
it would, for instance, be able to move automatically on a farm field 24-7
without having anybody on board while working the field.
Imagine that on the very wide plots
of land of Brazil, Argentina and China.
Actually somebody said that by using these technologies,
that is extreme work automation,
it might be possible to optimize land usage by 250%.
That could lead to a widespread production of food,
and could also lead to a revolution,
as we may become able to guarantee food security for the whole planet.
And that's just one example.
I'll show you some clips of the vehicles we have developed in our history.
In 1998, we basically crossed half of Italy,
2,000 km of automated driving.
In 2005, we crossed the desert of Nevada, again, with a driverless vehicle.
In 2007, we conducted a test in a city.
Those are only some of the types of vehicles we developed in the past.
What about the present? This is a vehicle we currently have in Parma.
We installed every kind of technology that crossed our mind on it.
We installed 10 video cameras on it - you can't see them, they're hidden -
so there are 10 video cameras, 4 laser scanners, 16 laser beams,
a GPS, a radar, anything that crossed our mind.
This vehicle is capable of autonomous movement.
It looks ahead, understands the environment, and reacts.
We brought this vehicle to two years ago.
We attempted to conduct a test.
It started from the Capitoline Hill
and went down to the Coliseum without a driver.
So the vehicle drove itself and was able
to detect and avoid obstacles, to brake when facing pedestrians,
and to manage other vehicles on the road,
it was a fantastic, quite an interesting and successful demonstration.
Yet, the question everyone was posing us was the following,
"OK, it works, we showed that, we succeeded up to the end.
But is it truly reliable, does it truly work
in any weather, traffic, or road condition?
A slightly crazy idea occurred to us: let's try something slightly different.
Let's try and install this technology
on some vehicles and send them to a faraway location.
Let's do some test, let' see
what is the longest and furthest travel we can make.
Last year the World Expo was in Shanghai, so we thought,
"Well, let' send our vehicles to the Expo,
let' show this technology to the world expo."
But the idea was "OK, let' send them", but we were not going to bring them there.
We started our vehicles in Parma, and they went to Shanghai on their own.
The slogan of this travel was
"13,000 km, 3 months traveling, nobody driving".
That happened the last year,
between the end of July and the end of October.
We arrived less than a year ago.
It was the first intercontinental,
driverless travel in history.
The true goals of this travel were testing our technology,
ascertaining whether it would or wouldn't work,
and in latter case, pointing out where the problem is
in order to fine tune it,
work some more in the lab on it and fine tune the whole system.
I'll show you the vehicle we used.
This is one of the vehicles as they looked like
when they left the factory, an electrical vehicle.
It's not an hybrid, it's entirely electrical.
This one, instead, is a picture of the same vehicles
as it was after our intervention.
We added some sensors, and we transformed it
from an electrical to an electrical-automatic vehicle
entirely autonomous and driverless.
As I said, the real goal was testing the technology.
Yet the vision we wanted to bring with us, our outlook on the future is this.
Someday we'll be able to ship goods
from one point to another on the whole globe,
without using drivers, that is without an human operator,
and maybe also without using gasoline, as we have used electrical vehicles
with a top mounted solar panel, used to recharge our driving system,
so maybe some day, we'll have a sustainable mobility,
and we will be able to ship goods from one point to another on the globe
without meddling with the environment or with energy.
I'll briefly show you what is seen by the vehicle.
The vehicle is able to recognize obstacles,
the roadway, and the contour of the terrain
and to localize the areas in which it can move.
After having perceived the environment, it takes decisions,
so it's able to decide where to go and to accelerate, brake, or steer.
Before leaving, we conducted some tests in Parma and in the vicinity of Parma,
in any condition that crossed our mind, as we didn't have the faintest idea
about the structure of the environment we were going to face during the travel.
We didn't know whether we would have met dirt roads,
asphalt roads, or some other kind of road infrastructure.
We knew nothing and we couldn't have done the test twice.
It took us three months.
We conducted tests everywhere.
This is a picture taken a few days earlier.
We have four vehicles.
Our four vehicles and my research group.
A few days before departing we were in Parma.
The starting point was Milan,
at the end of last year's July, we departed from Piazza Duomo.
Our vehicle's first step were escorted
by the Carabinieri, here in Piazza Duomo.
Now some picture of some of the steps of this adventure.
It certainly was an adventure from a technical point of view,
but also from a logistical, and infrastructural one.
We crossed Russia, part of Europe and Russia,
and experienced very high temperatures.
Some of the steps of this adventure were covered during nighttime.
We experienced different weather conditions.
We crossed areas where works were in progress,
as well as areas lacking infrastructures.
We have even reached some mountain passes in China,
we climbed up to almost 3,000 meters with these vehicles.
In short, what we did was immersing
our technology into the real infrastructure.
We didn't conduct an artificial test, it was real.
We entered into real roads
with real infrastructures, real weather, and real traffic,
and that was the most important part,
as indeed we managed to really test our technology.
Finally we reached the Expo.
We managed to enter the World Expo
and to have a parade at the end of our travel.
These are a few pictures we shot during the parade,
while our vehicles were moving inside the Expo.
I'll just show your the complete path
of the travel we undertook the past year.
Maybe now you can understand
why the title of this presentation is "On Marco Polo's Footsteps",
and the reason isn't that the path we undertook
is similar to Marco Polo's path, that is the Silk Route,
but rather that I would like
this adventure to be similar to the revolution
Marco Polo brought and established a contact between two different cultures,
the European and the Asian ones.
I'm confident we'll see this kind of technology on our roads shortly.
By shortly I mean within five to eight years from now.
Possibly, on some specific type of road,
such as highways, that present friendly infrastructures.
Probably we will have to wait 15 more years
to see a vehicle with this technology on urban roads,
but 15 years isn't that long a time.
If you consider that the car was invented more than 100 years ago,
15 years is a short time, we're almost done.
My outlook for the future of this field is that surely,
even if I don't know in how many years, maybe 10 or 20 years,
we'll get on our car and type our destination.
The vehicle will bring us to the destination automatically,
without anybody driving it.
We'll get off the car and, maybe, the vehicle will park itself.
Possibly also by going outside of the city,
or maybe it could become available for some other user.
So the future mobility will be entirely different
it will be a revolution
as I am confident that we will go beyond personal mobility,
that we will no longer own a personal car
as it will become a shared vehicle,
like having a taxi or a taxi driver constantly available, always on time,
and with a perfect knowledge of the surrounding environment.
That's my vision of the future. Thank you.
(Applause)