Driverless Vans go from Italy to China

Italian scientists celebrated in the autumn of 2010 when two specially equipped electric vans rolled into Shanghai, completing a journey of more than 13,000 kilometers from Parma that had begun in July — crossing nine countries including Russia and Kazakhstan with no human hand on the steering wheel for the vast majority of the route.

The vehicles, developed by the VisLab research group at the University of Parma under the direction of Alberto Broggi, used a combination of laser scanners, cameras, and GPS to navigate roads that ranged from well-maintained European motorways to the unpredictable rural highways of Central Asia. A human driver was present in each vehicle to take control in situations the autonomous systems could not handle — city centers, border crossings, unusually complex traffic scenarios — but for the vast majority of the journey, the vans drove themselves.

The achievement was not lost on the automotive industry, which had been watching autonomous vehicle development with a mixture of interest and skepticism. The VisLab experiment demonstrated something that laboratory testing could not: that autonomous driving technology was robust enough to function across different road surfaces, varying weather conditions, and traffic environments that differed radically from the structured environments in which most autonomous systems had previously been tested.

The journey took three months. The research team documented every failure mode encountered along the way, producing a dataset of autonomous driving challenges that would inform the next generation of their work.

In the decade that followed, autonomous driving went from academic experiment to the central focus of the automotive and technology industries. The vans that drove from Italy to China were early proof that the idea was not fantasy.