September 10, 2013
On September 4, 2013, a 2011 Cadillac SRX was driven from Cranberry Township, 20 miles north of Pittsburgh, to the Pittsburgh International Airport. The trip was 33 miles long. Nothing special here. The passengers in the car included Congressman Bill Shuster, Chairman of the US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Barry Schoch, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. What made this trip unique was that no human was driving the Cadillac. The Cadillac was driverless. It drove itself all the way. It plied through high-traffic multi-lane roads with traffic lights, and along two interstate highways at up to 65mph. The vehicle uses lidars, radars and cameras to provide 360-degree sensing around the car, and commands the brakes, the throttle, transmission and other secondary controls like turn signals.
After he was dropped off at the airport departures curb, Chairman Shuster remarked “This is the future”. This autonomous Cadillac was built by the General Motors–Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab (AD-CRL) based in ECE, which is co-directed by Raj Rajkumar, George Westinghouse Professor of ECE. Additional support for the work is provided by the National Science Foundation through the Cyber-Physical Systems program and the US Department of Transportation through the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation (T-SET) University Transportation Center (UTC). Prof. Rajkumar is the Principal Investigator of these efforts.
Read and see more at http://rtml.ece.cmu.edu/Shuster.