Autonomous vehicles in desert challenge

摘要

Engineers can send vehicles to other planets and steer them from crater to crater. But are they also able to design a truly autonomous robotic vehicle to drive across a stretch of desert in the middle of California, USA? What sounds relatively easy is called the Grand Challenge and it certainly lived up to its name. Autonomous vehicles seem to be old hat: driverless transport systems crawl over factory floors worldwide, car manufacturers regularly make headlines by sending their cars at high speed over race tracks leaving the drivers behind and two little rovers have been finding their way around Martian craters on their own, cut off by the 16 minute time lag signals take to Mars and back. So, provided you have the appropriate funding and an experienced contractor, sending an autonomous vehicle across an empty stretch of desert shouldn't be such a big deal, should it?