Olli: the 3-D printed self-driving bus
Local Motors brings new levels of personalization to mass transit
The next bus trip you take could be more personalized than you ever imagined. Tourist in a new town? You would receive the best reviews from across the web. Need to avoid that downtown traffic jam? How about a time-saving detour?
Arizona-based Local Motors has developed Olli, a self-driving bus complete with Watson intelligence so it that can answer questions like “Olli, can you take me downtown?” “How does this feature work?” Or even, “Are we there yet?”
Citylab explains the power of embedding chat in a vehicle:
The bus can be summoned in Uber-like fashion, can answer questions about routes and nearby attractions, and could eventually personalize the trip by linking with the passengers’ social media accounts.
To enable this level of human interaction, the bus leverages four Watson APIs — Speech to Text, Natural Language Classifier, Entity Extraction and Text to Speech.
In order to get around town, Olli uses laser sensors that can detect the distance of objects, and analyzes and learns from the high volumes of transportation data the sensors produce. Olli has a maximum speed of 25 mph and can transport up to 12 people.
Local Motors is intent on employing the latest technology to transform the transportation industry. In terms of building buses, these can actually be 3-D printed. Pilots are expected shortly in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas.
They also work on an open model of innovation, as co-founder John B Rogers explained to TechCrunch:
“Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” John B. Rogers, co-founder of Local Motors, said in a statement. “Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we’ve been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future. I’m thrilled to see what our open community will do with the latest in advanced vehicle technology.”
