Italy to China With No Driver!

Vehicles without drivers have hit the roads of China. In a scene that could be straight out of a science fiction novel a set of orange automatic vans have navigated about nine thousand miles from Italy to China. They will be featuring in the 2010 Expo in Shanghai.

The automatic vehicles used cameras and sensors to navigate the roads. Their top speed is 40 miles per hour and the vehicles are charged for 8 hours after they drive for a couple of hours. The cross country journey was a road test to fathom the different types of problems that such vehicle may face.

Project leader Alberto Broggi of Vislab, a spinoff company of the University of Parma said, "this was a real milestone in the history of robotics and vehicle robotics. No one has ever tried to do anything like this and they were really happy that they had made it".

93% of road accidents happen due to human error and the study hopes to help the driver or maybe even replace the driver with an autonomous system to help reduce and even eliminate road accidents.