Swedish researchers to test driverless truck that mimics biological systems

The Chalmers University of Technology team has developed a truck that can react quickly and safely to unexpected changes in its environment

Swedish researchers are taking inspiration from biological systems to develop driverless trucks that can process information more like animals than machines.

The goal is that future driverless trucks will react quickly and safely to sudden changes in its environment, just like an antelope running within its herd, or a hawk pouncing on its prey.

Ola Benderius, the team leader of the Chalmers University of Technology research, explains that the traditional – and dominating – way of developing vehicles is to constantly base progress on earlier vehicle models and gradually add new functions. He says that this method might not work when developing the autonomous vehicles of the future.

“Traditionally, the aim has been to try to separate and differentiate all conceivable problems and tackle them using dedicated functions, which means that the system must cover a large number of scenarios,” said Benderius. “You can cover a large number of different cases, but sooner or later the unexpected occurs, and that’s when an accident could happen.”

His team of researchers have instead chosen to approach the self-driving vehicle as a completely new type of vehicle that is more like an animal, or biological organism, than a technical system.

Benderius said: “Biological systems are the best autonomous systems we know of. A biological system absorbs information from its surroundings via its senses and reacts directly and safely, like an antelope running within its herd, or a hawk pouncing on its prey on the ground. Before humans walked the earth, nature already had a solution, so let’s learn from that.”

All information that the truck compiles from sensors and cameras is converted into a format that resembles the way in which humans and animals interpret the world via their senses. This enables the truck to adapt to unexpected situations in its basic design.

Instead of just one large program with dedicated functions for all conceivable situations, the team is working on small and general behavioural blocks that aim to make the truck react to various stimuli, just like an animal does. The truck is programmed to constantly keep all stimuli within reasonable levels, and it will even continuously learn to do this as efficiently as possible.

This makes the framework extremely flexible and able to manage sudden and new dangers, according to Benderius. He added: “We are trying to design a system that adapts to whatever happens, without pointing to specific situations – and this is something that even the simplest animals can usually do better than existing vehicle solutions.”

The software, OpenDLV (which stands for driverless vehicle), is being developed as open source code and is freely available on the internet. Through this, Benderius and his project group hope that other researchers around the world can join the project by running and developing the software in their own vehicles.

OpenDLV is intended to serve as an academic platform for researchers in many different scientific disciplines, such as vehicle engineering, adaptive systems, computer science and engineering, perception, neurology, and biology, where they can exchange knowledge about how autonomous vehicles should be made to enable their safe, large-scale introduction into society.

Researchers from the Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenberg, Sweden, are currently preparing its prototype truck for its first demonstration, which will be on the A270 motorway between Helmond and Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

This will take place within the framework of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge, an EU project and collaborative competition in which 10–15 universities compete against each other with autonomous vehicles.