Herbie Autonomous Car

Team Love Bugs
  • Mohammed Al Hasani
  • George Helmick
  • Rodolfo Hill
  • Steven Im
  • Michael Oliver
  • Mateo Perez

  Watch the Demo Video    Download the Project Poster

Project Sponsors: Professors Fabio Somenzi and Ashutosh Trivedi

Traffic related deaths are one of the leading causes of death worldwide every year, most of which are caused by human error. Not only can driving non-autonomously be incredibly dangerous, but it can also be very time consuming, as millions of people must commute to work every day.

Although autonomous cars are starting to gain more popularity, this technology is still a long way from being commonplace on our city streets. Additionally, not only is the autonomous vehicle problem currently unsolved on full sized cars, it is still not completely solved on scale-model vehicles either.

Herbie is an autonomous, electric, scale-model car that acts as a proof-of-concept for future autonomous vehicles while exploring the current technology involved with autonomous cars.

Autonomous vehicles target anyone from commuters to trucking companies, specifically, the people who do not have the ability to drive on their own. Individuals such as the elderly, disabled and visually impaired could benefit the most as they could be much more independent and be able to travel without a caretaker. There are also huge possible benefits for society collectively; as autonomous vehicles become more and more commonplace, road safety in general will dramatically increase. Not only could autonomous vehicles contribute to road safety, but users of autonomous vehicles could become much more productive as their commute times could be used for other tasks.

Autonomous vehicles offer a solution to this problem by enabling superhuman driving performance while requiring no human intervention. Herbie aims to explore the current state of the art of the technology associated with autonomous vehicles by having the ability to navigate itself around the main campus of the University of Colorado Boulder with minimal input from the user. More specifically, the user inputs a destination, and Herbie will navigate itself to it.