Autonomous Vehicles

After revealing plans to establish a nationwide network for self-driving trucks in the US just a few months ago, TuSimple has now announced it will be taking its technology to Europe, through a new partnership with Volkswagen subsidiary Traton Group.

The German Aerospace Center has revealed a working prototype of a multi-use urban mobility and logistics vehicle called U-Shift, which is made up of an electric U-shaped base platform that's used to ferry around various pod modules.

Whether it occurs in a car, plane, boat or VR environment, motion sickness is no fun. According to new research, though, it's possible for people to "train their brain" out of the condition, potentially reducing the symptoms by more than half.

While we hear a great deal about the huge patches of garbage that are floating on the world's oceans, there's even more trash lying on the seabed. The European Union-funded SeaClear project aims to gather much of it up, using autonomous robots.

While bicycle-sharing systems certainly are proving to be popular, they still have a few problems, such as the limited availability of bikes. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are working on a solution, in the form of the MIT Autonomous Bicycle.

Back in April, AutoX teamed up with Alibaba's Amap mobility platform to make robo-taxis available to Shanghai ride-hailers. But only a limited group of users could access the pilot program. Now AutoX and Amap have opened the service up to the public.

Through its years-long partnership with Waymo, Fiat Chrysler (FCA) has taken an active role in the development of self-driving technology, and is now expanding the scope of its efforts to include vehicles of a slightly larger footprint.

Although offshore structures such as wind turbines do need to be protected, crews of guard boats can get bored waiting around – plus, they have to be paid a salary. It was with this in mind that the Autonomous Guard Vessel was recently conceived.

Waymo already has a number of partnerships in place with household names like Walmart and Jaguar. It can now add Volvo to that list, with the two forming an agreement to develop electric vehicles that can drive autonomously.

Russia has a long history of experimenting with wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) vehicles, most notably the huge ekranoplans dating back to the 1960s. Now, Russian scientists are developing a smaller unmanned WIG, that's solar-powered.

After 18 months of planning, the Future Automated Bus Urban Level Operation System (FABULOS) project is about to roll into five European cities to field test autonomous last-mile shuttles in real-world conditions.

Last year, Cognitive Technologies installed its self-driving systems into combine harvesters operated by Russia's Rusagro. The pilot proved successful, and the technology will now be rolled out to 242 combines over the next year or so.