Thrun@TED

Below is a short TED presentation by Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford AI lab, talking about his motivation for working with autonomous vehicles and some footage from various projects like the DARPA challenges and more recently the Google project on autonomous driving.

VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge

The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge is underway since mid July. A number of electrical vehicles have been equipped with perception and control systems in order to (semi)autonomously navigate from Parma in Italy to Shanghai in China, where they will hopefully arrive in time for the last part of the World Expo. The vehicles move in a leader-follower fashion where the lead vehicle is partially guided by a human driver and the follower is autonomous (however its actions are influenced by the lead vehicle which is partially controlled).

There's been a lot of media attention and there's also a live video feed and position updates at the team website.