It ran from July 20, 2010 to October 28, 2010, involving four driverless vehicles driving with virtually no human intervention on an almost 16,000 kilometres (9,900 mi) trip from Parma, Italy to Shanghai, China.
VisLab, thanks to a project partially funded by ERC -the European Research Council- showed that one day it will be possible to move goods between two continents with non-polluting vehicles powered by green energy and with virtually no human intervention.
The aim was to test and stress the current technology in a unique event: non-polluting and non-oil based autonomous vehicles in real traffic conditions on an extreme journey between two continents, the final outcome being a huge dataset with a very large variety of situations to be further used to refine the onboard perception system.
The first vehicle drove autonomously in selected sections of the trip, conducting experimental tests on sensing, decision, and control subsystems, and continuously collecting data.
During the trip, demonstrations were scheduled in specific hot spots, showing autonomous vehicles following given routes, negotiating traffic, avoiding obstacles, and stopping when required.