Hitachi’s ROPITS – A Small Self-Driving Car

At present, almost every automobile makers are busy in developing electric vehicles. The automobile makers’ goal is to attract people through their phenomenal work. However, Japanese multinational engineering and electronics conglomerate company Hitachi has unveiled a tiny electric car called ROPITS which has been specially designed for the old citizens & physically disabled citizens.


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Hitachi’s ROPITS is similar to the Toyota’s i-Road which was shown at this year’s Geneva Motor Show. Hitachi’s ROPITS is a one seated self-driving car. The car will take the rider to his/her destination through GPS. The rider can program the transportation time and course by using the touch screen of a map-loaded tablet computer and ROPITS will take its rider to the desired location. Another exciting feature of this tiny car is it can park itself even in crowded streets.

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The car comes with a laser distance sensor, special stereoscopic camera and laser ranger finder. As soon as the rider inputs the desired location, the car starts creating a route map with the help of the back and front mounted gyro sensors and GPS. The sensors of ROPITS build a 3-D geometric map using accurate altitude information.

You will be able to see Hitachi’s tiny self-driven car ROPITS at Robotics & Mechatronics Conference, which is going to be held in Japan on this May. In a recent demonstration, Hitachi has shown how this car automatically picks up and drops passengers. See the demo video below for more.

Source: shiotsu-used-car

Image Credit: in.news.yahoo

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Imrul Haque is Product Engineer at TheTechJournal. He writes about new products and covers mobile apps. You can reach him on Twitter And Google+.

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