Olli: Driverless Electric Bus Made By Local Motors, Powered By IBM Watson On Streets of Washington
Local Motors, the Arizona based start-up responsible for the world’s first 3D printed car is back with a new vehicle. This time it is a bus that way ahead of its time. Named as Olli this bus is powered by batteries and is autonomous as well. Olli was built by Local Motors is association with IBM who provided the computing prowess of their supercomputer platform Watson specifically IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) for Automotive. The 12-seater bus Olli was unveiled at the Grand Opening of a new Local Motors facility in National Harbor, Maryland. From today the bus will start plying on the roads of Washington DC and will make its way to Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas late in 2016.
The self-driving shuttle Olli is equipped with overlapping sensors like RADAR, LIDAR and cameras to sense the local surroundings and act more quickly than a human driver. Do not worry though as all Ollies are currently being overseen by a human controller for the meanwhile. Olli can be built in a couple of hours by stamping out parts in micro factories. Olli is currently quite slow as the motors in the bus are able to power it up to 25mph. The team hopes to increase this speed quite soon. The passengers can hail Olli just like they do with Uber with the help of a smartphone app. While Olli is currently free to ride you will soon have to pay for it using the mobile app.
The cloud-based cognitive computing capability of IBM Watson IoT comes with four developer APIs -- Speech to Text, Natural Language Classifier, Entity Extraction and Text to Speech to enable seamless interactions between the vehicle and passengers. You can interact with Olli with voice commands about destinations like “Take me to [a particular place]†or “Are we there yet?†You can even ask Olli about its features and recommendations about local places. Local Motors is also planning to test this vehicle globally in cities like Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra.
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The self-driving shuttle Olli is equipped with overlapping sensors like RADAR, LIDAR and cameras to sense the local surroundings and act more quickly than a human driver. Do not worry though as all Ollies are currently being overseen by a human controller for the meanwhile. Olli can be built in a couple of hours by stamping out parts in micro factories. Olli is currently quite slow as the motors in the bus are able to power it up to 25mph. The team hopes to increase this speed quite soon. The passengers can hail Olli just like they do with Uber with the help of a smartphone app. While Olli is currently free to ride you will soon have to pay for it using the mobile app.
The cloud-based cognitive computing capability of IBM Watson IoT comes with four developer APIs -- Speech to Text, Natural Language Classifier, Entity Extraction and Text to Speech to enable seamless interactions between the vehicle and passengers. You can interact with Olli with voice commands about destinations like “Take me to [a particular place]†or “Are we there yet?†You can even ask Olli about its features and recommendations about local places. Local Motors is also planning to test this vehicle globally in cities like Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-# via #-Link-Snipped-#
Replies
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Sarathkumar ChandrasekaranIts nice to see startups eyeing on mass transportation in autonomous era. Beautiful design and it looks so futuristic.
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