Unlike traditional AI drivers, Honda’s unmanned cars can communicate and talk to you in real time, and can read your gestures.
The exterior and interior design is also very different from the Robotaxi seen on the street, with no LIDAR, let alone high precision maps.
Autonomous driving with a little fun behind the wheel – the car has a physical joystick.
The future can do the call and response, do you like it?
Honda launches 3 unmanned cars
Honda’s self-driving car, named CiKoMa.
Ci stands for Cooperative Intelligent, an interactive intelligence technology developed by Honda, which means that the machine can read human gestures and language and interact with people in real time; KoMa means “horse” in Japanese.
The actual production of the CiKoMa unmanned car, and the animation of the concept car is quite different.
There are three main categories: single-seater, two-seater, and four-seater, all of which are electric.
Let’s start by looking at this self-driving car that can accommodate only 1 person.
Well, it looks a bit like a cell phone booth.
This unmanned car, is as if sitting in an AI driver, you just have to move your mouth to summon or move your hands, it will drive to the designated location as required.
It will also automatically reroute the vehicle and inform the owner if a parking spot “seems” unsafe to it.
△ Translation: It’s not safe here, is it OK if I park near the conical barrel?
All conversations, which take place on the owner’s cell phone, are displayed on the page as follows.
Second, Honda’s 2-seat unmanned car looks like this, and is said to be designed for older people or those who are not good drivers.
The autopilot is accompanied by a specially designed joystick that allows passengers to change direction on their own.
Last but not least is this 4-seat unmanned car from Honda, which looks like a tour bus.
Starting this month, this 4-seat unmanned vehicle will be road tested with a safety officer.
As you may have noticed, Honda’s unmanned vehicle is not characterized by reliance on high precision maps.
It mainly uses parallax from the camera to generate 3D point clusters and identifies obstacles by processing point clusters through a grid. When the height of an obstacle exceeds a specified value, it is determined to be an impassable area, followed by rapid identification of a drivable area.
Then, the unmanned car will generate the optimal route to the target location in real time and drive smoothly along that route.
Honda believes that their unmanned cars will be used mainly for urban commuting, travel and sightseeing, and work running business, and in short the passage distance will not be too long.
According to the plan, it is said to be able to realize autonomous driving without high precision maps in 2~3 years, and move towards commercial landing around 2030.
Introduction of the research team
The R&D team is from Honda Technical Research Institute.
The main reason for designing such an unmanned car is that they want to solve social problems such as a serious aging population and labor shortage, and they want to help people who are not good at driving or cannot drive due to medical reasons.
They also believe that modern people are too busy at work and such a small, short-distance self-driving car is just right for their personal needs of short trips and relaxation.
The chief engineer of the institute is Yuji Yasui, who joined Honda in 1994, 28 years ago now, and is the project leader of Honda’s self-driving and assisted driving technology.
At an event held by Nvidia five years ago, Yuji Yasui publicly expressed.
"Honda aims to launch driverless passenger cars and does not need high precision maps."
It also said that Honda will achieve L4 level driverless by 2025.
He said that Honda wants to do self-driving, must meet two basic requirements, on the one hand, for passengers, surrounding vehicles and pedestrians to be safe and reliable, on the other hand, is smooth, natural and comfortable, self-driving to do as the old driver.
One More Thing
This time, together with the unmanned car, there is this companion robot: WaPOCHI.
Together, they are called “micro-mobility” (micro-mobility) by Honda, which means small-scale mobility.
Follow your ass every day, walk with you and shopping, can point the way can carry bags.
What’s more, it can also remember your face, walking down the street will not be lost.
How about it, you are excited about Honda’s unmanned car and this “electronic pet”?
