Autonomous vehicles prepared and tested to drive with no human intervention from Parma, Italy, to Shanghai, China, along a 13,000 km and 3 months unique journey.

Please check the official VIAC Project website to get a complete description of the challenge and the vehicles.

Partners and Funding

This unique effort would have not been possible without the illuminating cooperation between VisLab and Overland. The huge effort in terms of both human resources and financial involvement put into this project by VisLab is deriving directly from the European Research Council (thanks to an Advanced Grant awarded to Prof Alberto Broggi) and VisLab itself. ERC, upon reaching 1000 grants delivered to excellent scientists, selected 12 projects to represent ERC, and this project is one of them.
Unfortunately no financial help was received from Italian national institutional sources.

Technology

VisLab proudly selected the following technologies to be installed on its autonomous vehicles:

4+1 electric vehicles, spare parts, education on their internals, and help and maintenance throughout the trip
CAN-based servo motor on the steering wheel, GPS, UHF radio for vehicle-to-vehicle communication
On-the-halt and on-the move satellite communication systems, bandwidth for live image streaming, and sat-phone coverage
Systems for CO2 sensing and GPRS coverage for data communication
Solar Panel Monocrystalline Enfinity 240M6

Logistics

Logistic organization and expedition support

Other contributions

High definition cameras
Vehicles transformation and hardware set up
Video server for live satellite audio and video streaming
Vehicles decoration, advertising stickers
Viac application for iPhone