Talk about Driverless Vehicles

This summer, Leeds Met has organised a lunch-time lecture series in Leeds city centre, where speakers from Leeds Met could give presentations about their work or an interesting topic. The audience were intended to be just people from the street, during their lunch break. I was asked to give such a talk, about "Automotive Futures: Driverless Vehicles".

The series had been going on since June and was relatively well visited. However, now in August most people are on vacation. So when I set up my laptop and was ready to talk, there were only 4 people in the audience - all of them from Leeds Met. Well, this was a bit disappointing, but I went ahead anyway and gave an overview on driverless vehicles, with a history of robotics and some of my own work in the PROMETHEUS program and in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. The latter was actually quite relevant, as one day later there would be the announcement from DARPA about the Semi-finalists.

The talk took place in the Old Schoolboard in Leeds, 13:00-14:00. It might be repeated within the next few months, when people are back from vacation, and when the next DARPA Grand Challenge is in preparation on 3. November.