Driverless Yoyo. An amazing story

That is, I’ll tell you about the time we equipped a mini-car yoyo with artificial intelligence.

Driverless Yoyo. An amazing story

That is, I’ll tell you about the time we equipped a mini-car yoyo with artificial intelligence.

Summary

It – could – work!

After years of research and design, for clients or investment proof of concepts, we decided to create a prototype to answer this question: can we turn a vehicle into a smart car?

Our partnership with XEV allowed us to create this prototype based on the Yoyo electric city car. But what did we have to do? What do a vehicle neeed to see, perceive, decide while it is on the road amidst a thousand variables? How does technology allow us to replace human drivers by reducing errors and dangers?

In this journal we tell our story. The story of a car that one day, in Teoresi, we equipped with artificial intelligence.

Gene Wilder GIFfrom Gene GIFs
What does an autonomous smart car see? Lidar, cameras and sensor fusion.

The state of the art of autonomous driving technology on wheels takes us into a fascinating world: information gathering is done through HD cameras, lidar, ultrasound, radar, GPS integrated in real time through sensor fusion technique giving the in-vehicle computer brain a complete picture that allows it to digitally reconstruct the surrounding environment.

We remember the day we mounted and tested lidar and cameras on the XEV Yoyo very well. The 3D printed bar did not fit properly, we had to make adjustments, then we turned it on and on our computer screen we saw in real time what its digital eyes were seeing.

 

Training the virtual brain through virtual reality. Our prototype is tested as in a video game.

How could we test the functionalities of our project before moving on to physical modifications and road tests? By training our artificial intelligence software in a virtual environment, as in a video game.

We first performed a 3D scan of the vehicle and then created a meta-environment where artificial intelligence makes virtual object, pedestrians and cars move, reconstructing the randomness of the real world. The system is trained to avoid obstacles, recognize and avoid pedestrians, start the sensor fusion that the physical car will then have, and execute a path while staying on the track.

Why drive by wires? How to automatically command accelerator and brake

Drive-by-wire is how transportation engineering defines all automated control systems in a vehicle. Typically brake, accelerator, steering, and other controls are controlled by electronic control units using electromechanical actuators. In order to give our artificial intelligence total control of our Yoyo, we had to make all the controls that are usually in human hands electronically controllable. It was a work of system integration, but also often of a lot of patience with drills, files, saws, because here the mechanical, electrical, and electronic parts we added have to match perfectly with the original ones.

 

Our car detects pedestrians! Now is the time to move from the virtual to the real.

The time has come to put into action all that we have developed in the artificial world.

We have to test whether the car, just as it recognized obstacles and pedestrians in the 3D virtual environment, can now do it accurately in the real world as well. It’s true, we’ve already done it on other prototypes, on scale vehicles, we know our garage very well, the surrounding private path, and we’ve made our system know it very well. But will it know how to recognize a human being crossing the street? Early tests with stationary car are great! Now we have to really try, safely, limiting the speed of the car to the minimum.

It works! The algorithms are stable, even in different light conditions. Our Yoyo now brakes by itself if it finds an unexpected obstacle in front of it, such as a pedestrian.

 

The first goal achieved. The demo on March 22, 2022.

Today is an important day. It is the day.

Our entire design and development team is assembled, colleagues have come from all locations: Naples, Turin, Detroit. About 40 colleagues have been invited to the in-house presentation. Everything has to work at its best. We are sure that it will, but the demo effect is being felt, the excitement is only felt by looking into our eyes, peeking out from the face mask.

Our XEV Yoyo sets off, with a passenger on board. There is a strange feeling in observing the empty driver’s seat.  It takes a predetermined route, perfectly maintaining the roadway, stops when a pedestrian suddenly crosses the road, makes a left turn, avoids an obstacle, and parks in front of the garage entrance. Ovation. We did it.

 

 
XEV Autonomous Vehicle. A case history video.
Parigi te la porterai sempre con te, perché è davvero una festa mobile Hernest Hemingway (1950)
Parigi te la porterai sempre con te, perché è davvero una festa mobile Hernest Hemingway (1950)
L’EVENTO XEV e Teoresi insieme al Motor Show di Parigi 17-23 ottobre 2022

Il nostro prototipo verrà presentato all’evento Mondial de l’auto a Parigi in ottobre. Inutile dire che non vediamo l’ora che il mondo possa apprezzare il nostro lavoro.

Discover more
Non solo autonomous driving

Quello che presentiamo a Parigi è un sistema integrato, l’ecosistema di competenze Teoresi in cui la nostra XEV Yoyo driverless si integra perfettamente, dalla smart road alla smart city, dai connected vehicles alla mobilità intelligente. La rivoluzione della mobilità del presente e del futuro è multimodale. Non è solo muoversi in auto, ma anche metro, treni, scooter e bici, con un denominatore comune, la parola „green“. Propulsione elettrica, sostenibile, a basso impatto ambientale, è uno dei temi che sosteniamo quando parliamo di Engineering for human life.

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