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.

Related Content

  • Finnish city sets up robotic vehicle trials 
    October 29, 2020
    Test area will allow autonomous vehicles to be tested without human intervention
    Read More
  • Seoul Robotics opens doors of perception
    March 25, 2022
    SENSR-I software can capture actionable data on movement of people and vehicles
    Read More
  • EdgeVis removes bandwidth barriers to mobile streamed video
    October 26, 2017
    A new generation of video compression can lower transmission costs of data and make streaming from mobile and body-worn cameras a reality, as Colin Sowman discovers. Bandwidth limitations have long been the bottleneck restricting the expanded use of video streaming for ITS, monitoring and surveillance purposes. Recent years have seen this countered to some degree by the introduction of ‘edge processing’ whereby ANPR, incident detection and other image processing is moved into (or close to) the camera, so
    Read More
  • Sensors reducing pedestrian-car collisions
    January 22, 2016
    The EU-funded ARTRAC project has developed new sensor technologies which it believes could help meet the European Commission’s target of halving road accidents by 2020. The project, which includes carmakers Volkswagen and Fiat, developed an affordable radar sensor that uses multiple antennas to detect, classify and avoid obstacles on the road before collision and reduce the likelihood of vehicles colliding with pedestrians.
    Read More

Highlighted Content