At the intersection of 3D printing, autonomous vehicles and IBM’s famously advanced Watson computing platform sits Olli, an electric vehicle that can carry up to a dozen people.

This smart bus design features 30 advanced sensors to help it navigate around and communicate with other vehicles on the road. It is the first vehicle to use cloud-based computing from Watson to analyze high volumes of transportation data on the go.

It is also meant to humanize the experience of driverless vehicles, allowing passengers to interact conversationally with the machine on their ways to various destinations, “discussing topics about how the vehicle works, where they are going and why the car is making specific driving decisions.”

“These interactions are designed to create more pleasant, comfortable, intuitive and interactive experiences for riders as they journey in autonomous vehicles.”

With no need for a driver, passengers are able to sit anywhere and look out the windows, entering and exiting through a bus-like door much as they would on other forms of public transportation. The Olli could also help bridge the gap between large public systems and smaller forms of point-to-point transit.

The post Local Motors + IBM Watson = 3D-Printed Self-Driving Car first appeared on Gajitz.

City buses can be both a blessing and a curse as far as urban traffic is concerned. They can take a number of cars off of the road by offering an alternative means of commuting, but they can also hold traffic up with their low speeds and frequent stops. In an effort to clear up urban Chinese streets, a company called Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. came up with this strange-looking futuristic bus concept.

The 3D Fast Bus is a massive elevated two-lane-wide vehicle that actually straddles the lanes, with the main bulk of the vehicle riding well above the cars on the road. Cars can move freely below the bus, just like passing through a tunnel, and the bus has special sensors that send alarms when vehicles too tall to pass beneath start to get close. The passenger compartment isn’t nearly as dank and gloomy as the typical city bus; the design incorporates skylights and a more positive atmosphere to keep passengers happy. Which is no small task considering that one of these beasts can accommodate up to 1400 passengers.

One of the most exciting parts of this design is that it’s run entirely on electricity, partly from the grid and partly from solar collectors. According to the above video (an English transcript can be found here), the elevated bus is much cheaper to build and operate than a comparable train, and it takes far less time to build. The first of these monster buses is set to debut in Beijing’s Mentougou District where it will hopefully answer the many questions surrounding how the public will deal with sharing the road with elevated buses.

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Although riding the bus is more eco-friendly than every person driving a personal vehicle, public transportation has never been accused of being the most stylish, attractive way to get from one place to another. That might soon change with the aptly-named Superbus. Created by a team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, this crazy-looking vehicle is not, as one might assume, a stretch limo; it’s actually an Earth-friendly, scarily fast way to get to work.

Rather than running on a set schedule and making people wait at a central bus stop, the Superbus would take orders for pickups via the internet and SMS. To reduce pollution and increase fuel economy, the bus’ navigational program would try to combine trips whenever possible for riders who live near each other. Even with all this personalization, the Suberbus’ creators don’t expect fares to be any more expensive than current public bus fares.

With a name like Superbus, though, this thing will have to bring more than just on-time, front-door pickup, right? Well, it seems to have just about everything you’d want in a hipper, more attractive version of the much-maligned public bus. The vehicle can adjust its ground clearance to offer a smooth ride on city streets and a fast ride (up to 155 MPH) on the planned dedicated “Supertrack.” Sophisticated safety features include radar detection of obstacles and onboard sensors to tell the driver if everyone in the passenger compartment is buckled up.

The passenger compartment sounds much cooler than the standard bus, too. There are three compartments behind the cockpit, all separated with glass partitions. The first compartment features forward-facing seats while the rear compartments both feature inward-facing seats with conference tables in between. And maybe best of all is the inclusion of 16 gull wing doors for entrance and exit. The project has been in progress for quite a while now, and it’s already moved past the road test stages and into prototype testing. We probably won’t see these bad boys on the streets for a few years, but it will be well worth the wait the first time you step through those gull wing doors and into public transport luxury.

The post Death of Bus Stops? Take a Superfast Ride in the Superbus first appeared on Gajitz.