University of Nevada, Reno Math Professor Raul Rojas, along with three German colleagues, just completed a record-setting 1,500-mile autonomous drive through Mexico.
Averaging 250 to 300 miles a day, the number of daily miles occupants could remain alert, the team drove the retrofitted 2010 Volkswagen Passat wagon from Nogales to Mexico City. Along the journey, they passed through four major cities, including Guadalajara, as well as numerous construction cites.
Before they made the journey, Rojas and a graduate student spent six days driving through Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico gathering driving data from the onboard sensors, which included seven laser scanners, nine video cameras, seven radars and a highly precise GPS unit. At the end of that 4,000-mile journey, Rojas and the graduate student spent an additional 10 days in the lab checking the data for glitches.
Each night during the Mexico drive, the four-man team, including Fritz Ulbrich and Daniel Göhring of Freie Universität Berlin and Tinosch Ganjineh of Autonomos GmbH, an autonomous-vehicle research company, downloaded the day's driving data and backed-up the system just to make sure everything remained top-notch.
So why did Rojas and his team spend several days autonomously driving through Mexico? Rojas hopes to develop self-driving car systems that can do more than simply safely drive a car but can also predict the behavior of drivers and pedestrians.
"This is especially relevant in cities," Rojas said in a statement. "If a human can drive with two eyes, I am sure that we will be able to drive autonomously with a computer the size of a notebook and just a handful of video cameras in just a few more years."
Intriguingly, this isn't the only autonomous trip Rojas' VW has made. It also drove 190 miles round trip between Berlin and Leipzig, Germany. A University of Nevada, Reno representative told Mashable that Rojas is planning another autonomous trip in his VW for January from Reno to Las Vegas. After that, Rojas will turn his attention to outfitting an electric car with self-driving tech.