Students at an Israeli university have developed a robot that could be the engine behind automated cars of the future.
Intelligent Vehicle Operator, AKA IVO is a robot the size of a suitcase that you may just be able to sling into the drivers seat of your car and it’ll navigate the streets for you.
It integrates a whole load of sensors to work out where it should be going, how it can avoid objects such as trees, pedestrians and of course other cars and will hopefully transport you to your destination without a hitch.
Developed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, it combines the data it is fed from its sensors and an algorithm that processes the information to ensure it drives just like any human.
The benefit of IVO is that it’ll work in any car – it doesn’t need to be developed by car manufacturers to fit in with the hardware of vehicles. It’ll just work – almost like a plug and play driver.
“This way, you can still utilise the fleet of worldwide cars,” Oded Yechiel, one of the researchers involved in the project told the Daily Mail. “In addition, having a single product that is generic can really reduce costs of manufacturing when going to mass production.”
The robot only weighs 15kg, although the student team is hoping to make that a whole lot lighter when it goes into production. Although it’s not as heavy as the average suitcase on a transatlantic flight, it’s still too heavy for the researchers’ liking.
