Geneva Motor Showcase 2017: VW Group unveils ‘Sedric’ driverless pod concept
H ave you ever travelled in the little pods that carry you from Heathrow’s Terminal five Pod car park to the terminal? And did you, like me, wonder what it might be like to have one of these Ultra Global-designed pods at your disposition in real life, without the concrete driving lanes? A sort of driverless taxi?
Well think no more, for while Volkswagen’s Sedric is only a technical concept at the moment, this battery-electric, fully-autonomous pod seem almost like a replica of those Heathrow individual rapid transit (PRT) pods, even down the cabin in which the dashboard, steering wheel and pedals are substituted by just three buttons; Go, Stop, Call Operator.
S howing careless disregard for the rules of an acronym, Sedric stands for SElf DRIving Car and is an SAE Level Five autonomous driving machine, capable of making its own decisions about anything it meets. Well most things, albeit Ulrich Eichhorn, VW’s head of research says there might have to be some sort of operator system to call should Sedric meet something it’s never before encountered.
The electrical underpinnings and the chassis are based on VW’s MEB electrical architecture unveiled at Paris last year, with 60kwh battery pack mounted under the floor providing about 400km (249 miles) of range.
T he holder/user has a single button fob, which is pressed to summon Sedric which trundles along, opens its doors and awaits instructions.
“Then you tell it where to go and it takes you there,” says Eichhorn. “It then drives away and parks, perhaps recharging itself. It could even be programmed to go down to the supermarket and collect your shopping for you.”
L ummy, a car that does the shopping!
To make the technology work, Sedric is tooled with a formidable array of radar, camera and Lidar sensors. There are four Lidar ‘pucks’ mounted on the roof for wide-angle views in the near distance and another set of narrow-angle Lidar sensors mounted at bumper height.
Observe: What VW thinks future of transport could look like
“The top sensors create a sensing ‘curtain’ around the vehicle,” explains Eichhorn. “The lower ones scan further ahead and create a 25cm-high, flat-scan of the world.”
W hile Sedric is designed for total on-road operation (mainly in towns), it’s unlikely to get permission to go on the road without extensive trials such as the ‘campus’ tests being presently done on the Google Pod. It seems likely that VW would use its Wolfsburg base for just such trials. It’s also worth noting that Sedric isn’t badged as a Volkswagen and is merely heralded as coming from the Volkswagen Group.
S o there’s no indication about where this technology will be seen very first, however Audi is planning level-three autonomy for its forthcoming A8 limousine when it emerges next year. As we reported from the CES Display in January, there are still a lot of debates about level three and four autonomous driving and how the car mitts back control to the driver without scaring the living daylights out of them and in time for them to do something about whatever mess the car has got itself into.
Volkswagen has had a long history of research into autonomous driving tech. Its electrical research team joined Stanford University researchers to create the autonomous ‘Stanley’ VW Touareg, which won the two thousand five DARPA autonomous driving challenge. It was these challenges, sponsored by the American defense department, which very first commenced Google down the road of autonomous driving. Since then, VW has driven the Pikes Peak hill climb autonomously, created the autonomous Golf fifty three Plus One and demonstrated various self driving Audi models.
“We’ve been looking at autonomous driving technology for over twenty years,” says Eichhorn, but it’s only recently that the idea has become feasible as sensors and computation technology makes it possible.”
T hat computational technology consists of the enlargened power of computers to treat lots of data quickly, the heightened connectivity of the car with outside resources such as The Cloud and the algorithms, which permit it to make quick decisions.
For all the latest news, advice and reviews from Telegraph Cars, sign up to our weekly newsletter by coming in your email here
Geneva Motor Demonstrate 2017: VW Group unveils – Sedric – driverless pod concept
Geneva Motor Showcase 2017: VW Group unveils ‘Sedric’ driverless pod concept
H ave you ever travelled in the little pods that carry you from Heathrow’s Terminal five Pod car park to the terminal? And did you, like me, wonder what it might be like to have one of these Ultra Global-designed pods at your disposition in real life, without the concrete driving lanes? A sort of driverless taxi?
Well think no more, for while Volkswagen’s Sedric is only a technical concept at the moment, this battery-electric, fully-autonomous pod seem almost like a replica of those Heathrow individual rapid transit (PRT) pods, even down the cabin in which the dashboard, steering wheel and pedals are substituted by just three buttons; Go, Stop, Call Operator.
S howing careless disregard for the rules of an acronym, Sedric stands for SElf DRIving Car and is an SAE Level Five autonomous driving machine, capable of making its own decisions about anything it meets. Well most things, albeit Ulrich Eichhorn, VW’s head of research says there might have to be some sort of operator system to call should Sedric meet something it’s never before encountered.
The electrical underpinnings and the chassis are based on VW’s MEB electrical architecture unveiled at Paris last year, with 60kwh battery pack mounted under the floor providing about 400km (249 miles) of range.
T he holder/user has a single button fob, which is pressed to summon Sedric which trundles along, opens its doors and awaits instructions.
“Then you tell it where to go and it takes you there,” says Eichhorn. “It then drives away and parks, perhaps recharging itself. It could even be programmed to go down to the supermarket and collect your shopping for you.”
L ummy, a car that does the shopping!
To make the technology work, Sedric is tooled with a formidable array of radar, camera and Lidar sensors. There are four Lidar ‘pucks’ mounted on the roof for wide-angle views in the near distance and another set of narrow-angle Lidar sensors mounted at bumper height.
Witness: What VW thinks future of transport could look like
“The top sensors create a sensing ‘curtain’ around the vehicle,” explains Eichhorn. “The lower ones scan further ahead and create a 25cm-high, flat-scan of the world.”
W hile Sedric is designed for utter on-road operation (mainly in towns), it’s unlikely to get permission to go on the road without extensive trials such as the ‘campus’ tests being presently done on the Google Pod. It seems likely that VW would use its Wolfsburg base for just such trials. It’s also worth noting that Sedric isn’t badged as a Volkswagen and is merely heralded as coming from the Volkswagen Group.
S o there’s no indication about where this technology will be seen very first, tho’ Audi is planning level-three autonomy for its forthcoming A8 limousine when it shows up next year. As we reported from the CES Display in January, there are still a lot of debates about level three and four autonomous driving and how the car mitts back control to the driver without scaring the living daylights out of them and in time for them to do something about whatever mess the car has got itself into.
Volkswagen has had a long history of research into autonomous driving tech. Its electrical research team joined Stanford University researchers to create the autonomous ‘Stanley’ VW Touareg, which won the two thousand five DARPA autonomous driving challenge. It was these challenges, sponsored by the American defense department, which very first began Google down the road of autonomous driving. Since then, VW has driven the Pikes Peak hill climb autonomously, created the autonomous Golf fifty three Plus One and demonstrated various self driving Audi models.
“We’ve been looking at autonomous driving technology for over twenty years,” says Eichhorn, but it’s only recently that the idea has become feasible as sensors and computation technology makes it possible.”
T hat computational technology consists of the enlargened power of computers to treat lots of data quickly, the heightened connectivity of the car with outside resources such as The Cloud and the algorithms, which permit it to make quick decisions.
For all the latest news, advice and reviews from Telegraph Cars, sign up to our weekly newsletter by injecting your email here