Skip to main content

VTT 's robot car now sees through fog

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland says it is one step closer to creating a safe automated vehicle through upgrades made to its Marilyn robot car. The vehicle can now see through foggy and snowy conditions, navigating without stopping. Additionally, VTT says, the car can see humans through fog and avoid accidents automatically. Marilyn now has light imaging, detection, and ranging (Lidar) mounted on its roof, which the company claims enables it to see wavelengths beyond the human senses.
May 15, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
814 VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland says it is one step closer to creating a safe automated vehicle through upgrades made to its Marilyn robot car. The vehicle can now see through foggy and snowy conditions, navigating without stopping.


Additionally, VTT says, the car can see humans through fog and avoid accidents automatically.

Marilyn now has light imaging, detection, and ranging (Lidar) mounted on its roof, which the company claims enables it to see wavelengths beyond the human senses.

Matti Kutila, VTT’s project manager, says: "Although Marilyn's vision is limited to roughly 30m in thick fog, the new Lidar type allows the car to be driven slowly rather than having to fully stop.”

The car now features optical component wavelengths via the 1550 nanometre Lidar and has additional intelligence for its software design to improve sensor capabilities. Software modules have been built in for the filtering of point clouds and the assessment of scanner reliability.

However, Marilyn's automotive radars and Lidar's detection of non-metallic obstacles and resolution is limited, particularly when trying to recognise shapes.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Hikvision boosts road safety with smart detection of traffic violations
    December 20, 2022
    Traffic violations cause negative outcomes, from accident and injury to road blockages that cause long and frustrating delays for other road users. Hikvision explains how its detection solution mitigates these outcomes…
  • FPT enters agreement to develop self-driving EVs in Vietnam
    April 24, 2019
    Vietnamese information technology company FPT Software has partnered with Yamaha Motor and urban developer Ecopark to self-driving electric vehicles (EVs). The partners say they are seeking to accelerate the adoption of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies and bring smart public transport to Vietnam. Hoang Nam Tien, FPT’s chairman, says: “We hope this collaboration would bring us to the day where autonomous cars using our technologies could travel across urban areas, luxury resorts, factories and warehous
  • Interoperability: towards the new frontier
    October 22, 2018
    After six years of intensive research, testing and negotiation, the US tolling industry is well on its way to groundbreaking results in the effort to establish regional - and eventually national - toll interoperability, says IBTTA’s Bill Cramer. Interoperability has been a high priority on the US tolling industry’s agenda for more than a decade. But several factors made it a uniquely complex issue to resolve - including the number of agencies involved, the significant investments those agencies had already
  • Biometric wearables ‘to disrupt the automotive industry’
    November 18, 2016
    Advances in biometrics will radically transform the driving experience, health wellness and wellbeing (HWW) and security of vehicles by 2025, according to Frost and Sullivan. As one in three new passenger vehicles begin to feature fingerprint, iris, voice and gesture recognition, heart beat and brain wave monitoring, stress detection, fatigue, eyelid and facial monitoring and pulse detection, these will be driven by built-in, brought-in and cloud enabled technologies, the automotive biometrics network wi