The timeline for autonomous cars hitting
the road en masse keeps getting closer. General Motor's Cadillac
division expects to produce partially autonomous cars on a
large scale by 2015, and the car manufacturer also predicts it will
have fully autonomous cars available by the end of the
decade. Audi and BMW have also shown
self-driving car concepts, with the former working with Stanford
University to pilot a modified TT up Pikes Peak.
Meanwhile, Google is ripping along at its own rapid pace with a
fleet of fully autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids that have logged
over 482,800km. And the company has pushed through legislation that
legalises self-driving cars in Nevada. California is close behind,
and Google has also been busy lobbying joyriding
lawmakers in Washington DC.
But while we know that robo-cars are coming, the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently released
predictions that autonomous cars will account for up to 75 percent
of vehicles on the road by the year 2040. The organisation went
even further, forecasting how infrastructure, society and attitudes
could change when self-driving cars become the norm around the
middle of the century.
IEEE envisions an absence of traffic signs and lights since
highly evolved, self-driving cars won't need them, and it believes
that full deployment could even eliminate the need for driver's
licences.
While this all sounds sci-fi, we're already starting to see
separate threads of this autonomous-car future being weaved in
current real-world tests.
It's been assumed that the largest hurdle for autonomous cars is
building the infrastructure. Not so, says Dr Alberto Broggi, IEEE
senior member and professor of computer engineering at the
University of Parma in Italy. Broggi, the director of a 2010
project that successfully piloted two driverless cars on an
12,800km road trip from Parma to Shanghai, points out that two
current types of self-driving cars will need less infrastructure,
not more.
"The Google cars are based on very precise maps and they have
sensing primarily based on a LIDAR technology," he told Wired.com.
"The cars that we tested on the route from Parma to Shanghai had no
maps, and had sensing primarily based on cameras. In both cases,
the cars have no help from the infrastructure."
When approached for comment, a Google spokesman declined to make
a statement on this story and IEEE's predictions on autonomous
cars.
But Broggi also delineates between what he sees as different
levels of self-driving technology as the features mature, and adds
that infrastructure in the form of centralised communication will
be crucial once large numbers of autonomous cars are on the
road. This could lead to traffic lights, speed limits and even
driver licensing disappearing. "Autonomous cars alone will bring
limited benefits," he says. "They would be able to locate
obstacles, avoid them and follow the road. But efficient autonomous
operations would also require that vehicles coordinate with each
other."
A nascent form of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) is
currently being tested in a NHTSA field trial in
Ann Arbor, allowing cars to share situational data to avoid
crashing into each other. Meanwhile, Volvo is testing the concept
of using "road trains" in
Europe to allow for more efficient driving. "A train of vehicles
moving very close to each other would reach a higher throughput --
the number of cars per road unit -- and have lower fuel consumption
due to aerodynamic drift," says Broggi.
Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication would also allow
vehicles to share their position, destination and intended route
with a central station, Broggi continues, that could coordinate and
dispatch information about traffic and route vehicles accordingly.
"Suppose all cars are connected and a central station knows
precisely their position and destination," Broggi says. "The
central station can send speed adjustment commands to the vehicles
that enter an intersection in such a way that they do not collide
and they occupy the intersection area one at a time, optimising
their movements. In this case, traffic lights will not be required
since coordination is reached at a higher level." We're already
seeing a basic form of this in testing going on in
Europe that combines V2V and V2I communication,
collectively known as V2X.
IEEE also foresees autonomous vehicles accelerating car sharing
and helping make it more widespread, especially for people within a
wider range of ages and physical abilities. And driverless cars may
even eliminate the need for driver's licences. "People do not need
a licence to sit on a train or a bus," said Azim Eskandarian,
director of the IEEE's Center for Intelligent Systems
Research, in a statement. "In a
full-autonomy case in which no driver intervention will be allowed,
the car will be operating. So there will not be any special
requirements for drivers or occupants to use the vehicle as a form
of transportation."
IEEE also predicts that the biggest barrier to pervasive
adoption of driverless cars may have nothing to do with technology,
but will be general public acceptance. While the average driver may
grasp the basic benefits of autonomous cars -- increased fuel
efficiency and safety, along with a reduction in traffic -- it may
not be enough to get them to let go of the steering wheel. Jeffrey
Miller, IEEE member and associate professor of computer systems
engineering at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, believes
that baby steps in the form of
driver assist systems may help. "As more vehicular
controls become automated, such as parallel parking and automatic
braking, people will become more accepting of autonomous
technologies," Miller told Wired.com. "So by 2040, driverless
vehicles will be widely accepted and possibly be the dominant
vehicles on the road."
Source: Wired.com
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