SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES: COMING TO A STREET NEAR YOU
Okay, you probably won’t see autonomous vehicles driving near you anytime soon, unless you live in Silicon Valley, where Google has been extensively testing its famous self-driving Toyota Prius (shown below during at demo at TED) and now also a fleet of autonomous golf carts. But one thing’s for sure: Autonomous vehicles have proliferated in the past few years, with projects in the United States, Germany,France, Italy, the U.K., and China. Last year, Nevada became the first U.S. state to permit autonomous cars to be legally be driven on public roads (though some speculate that Europe might prove more friendly to this type of vehicle than the United States.) Either way, autonomous driving features are already showing up on regular mass-produced cars. Some models of the Prius now have a driving assist function that keeps the car centered on its lane, and another function can park the car all by itself. Though carmakers will insist these are not autonomous driving features, it’s clear that cars are becoming more robotic. Furthermore, it’s likely that autonomous vehicles will drive another trend as well: As one panelist explains, we should start to “map, and perhaps even instrument, our environment” to help autonomous cars and robots navigate. “This is a shift,” he says. “The emphasis used to be solely on local algorithms and computation. Folks are starting to realize that this is not the low-hanging fruit.” Driving, we’ll soon be able to say, is so 20th century.
Google demonstrates its self-driving car at the TED 2011 conference. Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr
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