It works !! is good !!! The first time I heard this words in the truck I was so exited. Our autonomous driving truck is the result of months of hard work made by the entire Chalmers Truck team for the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge GCDC 2016. What we achieved and what we all learned from this work has been incredible, thanks to the entire team, including who is not in this picture.

This paper is presenting the ongoing work toward a novel driving assistance system of a robotic wheelchair, for people paralyzed from down the neck. The user’s head posture is tracked, to accordingly project a colored spot on the ground ahead, with a pan-tilt mounted laser. The laser dot on the ground represents a potential close range destination the operator wants to reach autonomously. The wheelchair is equipped with a low cost depth-camera (Kinect sensor) that models a traversability map in order to define if the designated destination is reachable or not by the chair. If reachable, the red laser dot turns green, and the operator can validate the wheelchair destination via an Electromyogram (EMG) device, detecting a specific group of muscle’s contraction. This validating action triggers the calculation of a path toward the laser pointed target, based on the traversability map. The wheelchair is then controlled to follow this path autonomously. In the future, the stream of 3D point cloud acquired during the process will be used to map and self localize the wheelchair in the environment, to be able to correct the estimate of the pose derived from the wheel’s encoders.

Along with CETMA - Area DIM there is a high active work on virtual reality and immersive systems

The amazing work of CETMA - Area Dim describing a novel hardware/software platform dedicated to design review process simplification, using immersive reality technologies. The proposed platform allows designers to interface with CAD engines and visualize different data types simultaneously into an immersive and stereoscopic multi-view visualization system. During the immersive sessions, the user can activate functionalities using cost-effective pointing devices and new conceived 3dUIs projected into the virtual environment. In this way, it is possible to easily manipulate virtual objects, perform basic operations such as rotations and translations but also more complex CAD functionalities such as surfaces shape modification. Each feature can be selected inside the virtual world using the smart 3D disk.
Users evaluations show that the use of a virtual environment may enhance the perception of designers ideas during the design process and the use of smart 3D interfaces simplifies the interaction among user and virtual objects.