The ARGO Autonomous Vehicle
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These pages are dedicated to the ARGO autonomous vehicle, developed at the
Department of Information Technology (Dipartimento di Ingegneria
dell'Informazione), University
of Parma, PARMA, Italy, under the frame of the Progetto Finalizzato Trasporti
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(directed by Prof. L.Bianco),
of the CNR, Italian National Research Council.
The research on autonomous vehicles at the University of Parma dates back to 1989, when the first vision algorithms and computer architectures were developed and tested on MOB-LAB, the MOBile LABoratory available to all the Italian Research Units involved in the European PROMETHEUS Project. The PROMETHEUS project ended in 1994 with a final demonstration in Paris (France) of the results achieved during the previous years, but the research conducted in our Department continued, founded by the Italian National Research Council. Within this framework, the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione acquired a vehicle, ARGO, and equipped it with specialized devices for autonomous driving on highways and freeways. Nevertheless, the robustness of the approaches used and the portability of the algorithms, allowed to test ARGO also on extraurban rural roads.
In the first week of June 1998, this vehicle was demonstrated to the
public and to the research community thanks to a 2000 km tour throughout Italy
during which the vehicle drove itself autonomously.
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