SNU’s autonomous vehicle ‘SNUver’ became the first to succeed in city center test drive in Korea – ‘SNUver’, an self-driving car developed by SNU’s Intelligent IT Research Center

- first domestic self-driving car to test drive in public city roads including Yeouido


▲ Seo Seung-Woo, Head of SNU Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center (Professor of SNU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

 
Autonomous vehicle running without a driver went out for a city center test drive, for the first time in Korea.
 
SNU College of Engineering has announced that ‘SNUver’, an autonomous vehicle developed by the SNU Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center (Head. Seo Seung-Woo, Professor of SNU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) has recently succeeded in its test-run o city roads of Yeouido.
 
SNUver, first introduced in November 2015, is now upgraded to ver.3, SNUver 3. For about 2 years, it has been improved through more than 20000km of test runs in the campus, especially on the recognition of vehicles, pedestrians, lanes, traffic lights and traffic signs, and the decision making that follows.
 
The research team has actually received license for road driving before their first test-run onomplex city roads such as Yeouido. Self-driving on urban streets requires much more complex technologies than on highways, because there are more variables such as pedestrians, lane switching, parked cars and silence intersections.
 
Prof. Seo explained that “so far, autonomous vehicles were tested only on highways, while SNUver passed the urban driving test, which is considered the most difficult task for self-driving cars.”
 
SNUver can run with such precision due to the 64 Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors that use laser beams to detect external environment in 3 dimensions. The sensor locates itself with errors under few centimeters, for 10 times every second.
 
As a result, SNUver has reached level 3 in the 4 levels used to define autonomous vehicles, which a driver is needed only in unexpected situation.  They will start commercialization process as soon as they succeed in fully-automated urban-driving, which is level 4.
 
Competitors overseas have already succeeded in urban-driving and started commercialization. Baidu of China, in cooperation with BMW, succeeded in Beijing city center driving with an autonomous vehicle based on BMW3 in 2015. Uber is already test-operating 43 automated taxis based on Volvo and Ford cars in U.S. cities like Tempe, Pittsburgh and Phoenix since September 2016.
 
The research center plans to stabilize SNUver 3’s performance until the end of the year, and with the data obtained, they will verify whether the current Traffic Infra and Laws are suitable for automated driving. They are also planning for trial ride event for the public in the upcoming November.
 
Prof. Seo said that “this SNUver test-run was meaningful in that it first introduced an autonomous car able to drive in city center in Korea.” And that “we will develop further so that fully-automated driving is possible.”
 
The research team has also introduced a new type autonomous car ‘SNUvi’. SNUvi is developed on a different car platform from SNUver, and will go out for a test-run in the upcoming August.