Automated driving using the example of "Olli

Urban Mobility Project with Space Drive

In a joint project of various partners under the leadership of the US company Local Motors, the self-driving vehicle project Olli was realised in Phoenix and presented to the interested public in Washington. Schaeffler Paravan is very proud to have made an important contribution to the roadworthiness of Olli in this innovative and future-oriented project with its fail-safe drive-by-wire system Space Drive. With Space Drive, Olli is the first autonomously driving "people mover" with multi-redundant (fail operational) control of throttle, brake and steering. After the official presentation, 'Olli' will be used on public roads in the Washington DC area, and from the end of 2016 also in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas.

The "Olli" project

Olli is a self-driving (autonomous) vehicle for future passenger transport in urban regions (e.g. airports, city centres, fairgrounds, amusement parks) that can comfortably seat up to 12 people. The American company Local-Motors is in charge of the project. Together with seven partners from all over the world, Olli was equipped with the most forward-looking technologies for autonomous driving of the future. Thanks to the innovative Space Drive system, a wide variety of sensor and GPS data is processed in the vehicle in a bundle and forwarded in an absolutely fail-safe manner to highly developed servo motors to control accelerator, braking and steering movements. This makes Olli a unique self-driving passenger transport vehicle with fail-safe and road-approved drive-by-wire technology.

Olli is the first vehicle to use the cloud-based, cognitive computing capability of the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) to analyse and learn from large amounts of transportation data provided by more than 30 sensors integrated throughout the vehicle. The sensors are driven and continuously adapted using Local Motors' open vehicle development process. The Space Drive drive-by-wire system serves as the interface for the sensors and for fail-safe control of the accelerator, brake and steering. The platform is also capable of four Watson developer APIs - Speech to Text, Classified Natural Language, Entity Extraction and Text to Speech - to enable seamless interaction between the vehicle and passengers.