Meet Olli, the autonomous electric people mover from Local Motors
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IBM Watson is another
partner on the Olli project, supplying the intelligent interaction
system where passengers interact with the vehicle.
Jonathan Gitlin
This is the Strati, the first 3D-printed car. It only takes a few
minutes comparing it to the Swim and Olli to see how the process is
maturing.
David Woessner at Local Motors told us that the company is working with
the Department of Energy and Oak Ridge for some interesting trials at
Oak Ridge National Lab where it would use inductive charging at shuttle
stops to keep Olli continuously topped up.
Local Motors is not your regular car company. It's been pioneering the use of open source development
to design its vehicles, starting with the Rally Fighter off-road sports
car and a number of vehicles that have been the result of competitions,
including one held in conjunction with the Department of Energy's
ARPA-E. Most recently, the company unveiled Olli, its first autonomous
vehicle. When we discovered that Olli was just up the road in National
Harbor, Maryland, we decided it was time to head over there to find out
more.
Local Motors has a large retail location at
National Harbor (selling merchandise), along with a test lab complete
with a gigantic 3D printer for rapid prototyping. Several of the
company's designs were also on display—the Strati, which was the first 3D-printed car,
as well as the Swim, which was the winning design from its Project
Redacted competition. And of course, Olli the autonomous people mover.
As we looked at the Swim, David Woessner,
general manager at Local Motors, explained the ongoing process that's
expanding Local Motors' product line up. "We started in July of 2015. In
September of that year, we did the first print and revealed the car in
November. It's the next iteration in our path to a highway car."
"Right now we're still working on a test mule
for highway certification," he continued. "We'll have a family of
low-speed individual vehicles and a family of higher speed highway
vehicles that we're now putting together for the crash certification
process," he told us. Underneath the Swim's 3D-printed body is a rolling
chassis from BMW's i3 electric vehicle. "It was the easiest way for us
to get to a vehicle with a body that was in line with a highway
certified car," he said.
At the far end of the lab, beyond that
gigantic 3D printer, sat Olli. "This is the newest family of vehicles,
the Olli. It's in a proof of concept phase and we've already taken
orders for it. This is version 0.0 but we're finishing some engineering
changes to make it version 1.0," he explained. "It seats 8-12 people,
and it's very comfortable on the interior. A lot of the interior is
3D-printed—you can see the refinement versus the Strati. We didn't mill
the finish but you can see the refinement of the printing. And a lot of
the tooling for the form-pulled plastics were 3D-printed, as were the
wheel wells. The other big thing is it's all-electric, and it uses lidar
and autonomous technology." As currently configured, Olli has a range
of 60 miles (100km) at speeds of between 12-18mph (19-29km/h).
Olli is a little reminiscent of the autonomous people movers that are now being tested in the UK.
But the vehicle is not actually in service yet. "We're getting calls
right now from people asking to ride Olli," Woessner said. "We're in the
process of working with the team to make that a reality... but also to
get the regulations in place. There's a couple of things from a final
development and testing perspective we need to finish with the vehicle.
And then for the state of Maryland there's currently no autonomous
driving regulation. In National Harbor, though, we have some private
roads with our partners at the Peterson companies that we're working on
getting permission to use, and we're mapping out the right route to have
people experience Olli," he told us, adding that the hope is to have
everything ready for operations to begin later this summer.
Local Motors is an active participant in
Maryland's process of crafting regulations for autonomous vehicles. "The
one challenge we've seen is that the group is focused primarily on
highway vehicles. We're interested in that application, but the low
speed is where we think the initial consumer applications will be,
particularly for environments like National Harbor or the National Mall
in DC, or some large parks like Disney," Woessner said."We want
regulations that are appropriate for that use case versus highway speed.
I think there's the potential to tailor legislation and regulation for
driving on an interstate or state highway versus a county or local road
at a speed of less than 25mph."
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