We’d like to share two important news on the latest developments on autonomous guide vehicles developed in Politecnico di Milano laboratories. Prof. Matteo Corno, associate professor of Politecnico di Milano and teacher for TechCamp@POLIMI of the Mobility – Towards autonomous Vehicles, is a leader subject matter expert and is a technical supervisor for both PoliMOVE, which has recently won one of the first races in autonomous guide vehicles, and project BUDD-e, aiming to develop autonomous robots to support people with impaired sight or blindness. Let’s discover them!
Friday 7/1/2022 was a real milestone in the history of autonomous cars. The first head-to-head high speed competition between fully autonomous cars culminated with a spectacular final race between PoliMOVE (Politecnico di Milano) and TUM (Technical University of Munich) in the AutonomousChallenge@CES at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Our A.I. Driver AS.CAR.I. got his very first victory, “at the wheel” of the fully-autonomous Dallara AV-21. PoliMOVE Autonomous Racing Team of Politecnico di Milano, supported by The University of Alabama (Prof. Brandon Dixon and Cole Frederick), wishes to thank Energy Systems Network (ESN) and Juncos Hollinger Racing for the tremendous work done together. Thanks to Paul Mitchell and Matt Peak, together with Kris Kozak, Janam Sanghavi, Kent Anderson, Lauren McIntyre, Craig Brooks. Thanks also to our super-strong “rival” TUM (Markus Lienkamp, Alexander Wischnewski and Phillip Karle ) for the great final match and to TII EuroRacing (Marko Bertogna, Ayoub Raji and Danilo Caporale), Kaist (Andrea Finazzi), Virginia (Madhur Behl), Auburn (Will Bryan), MIT-Pitt (Andrew Saba and Nayana Suvarna), Hawaii (Gary Passon) teams. This final race condensed the enormous work that all the teams have done TOGETHER to bring the AV-21 at this very high level.
The kick-off meeting of the BUDD-e project took place on Thursday, 17th March 2022. BUDD-e is a #research project with social purposes coordinated by Prof. Marcello Farina from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano which was selected among the winners of the last edition of Polisocial Award.
The BUDD-e project aims at exploiting the multidisciplinary expertise of the team members (#ict, #robotics, #architecture, #engineering and #architecturaldesign) to support the accessibility to public (possibly structured) places or indoor environments by blind and visually impaired persons. In particular, the project aims to devise an innovative autonomous robotic guide, tailored on the special needs of blind and visually impaired users. The envisaged application scenarios are wayfinding in healthcare facilities and training in sport centers.
