The Europen Research Council supported the VisLab Director (prof. Alberto Broggi) to receive an Advanced Grant for  a very innovative research in the field of intelligent vehicles:  Open intelligent systems for Future Autonomous Vehicles (OFAV).

The project’s objective is the development of an open architecture for future autonomous vehicles to become a standard platform shared by car makers in the design of next generation intelligent vehicles. It is based on a 360 degrees sensorial suite which includes perceptual and decision making modules, with the ultimate goal of providing the vehicle with autonomous driving capabilities and/or supervise the driver's

behavior. The perception module also includes vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure subsystems, to increment the vehicle’s sensing capabilities.

The research is based on the extended know-how and experience

of VisLab at the University of Parma, which already marked fundamental milestones worldwide in the field of vehicular robotics. Car manufacturers and automotive suppliers are extremely interested in this research stream, but at the same time are very cautious in investing in long term and risky research like this.

Besides providing clear advantages on safety for road users, the availability of an open architecture will encourage and make possible the sharing of knowledge between public and private research communities (academic and automotive industry) and thus speed up the design of a standard platform

for future vehicles. Further research steps will be eased -and therefore made more effective- thanks to the common and open architectural layer proposed by this project.

During the definition of the architecture, real tests are mandatory on real vehicle prototypes: vehicles must be able to perceive the environment, take decisions, and move accordingly, all without any human intervention. In order to test the different modules and to collect a uniqu

e set of data in extremely different environmental conditions, VisLab decided to organize an extensive test: a trip from Parma to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China, to be covered by autonomous vehicles.