Drive me home, please

It is 9.15 a.m. Thursday, June 26, 2036. You are a little late for that appointment you made the previous day. No need to panic though. You just get into the car, program the destination on the GPS system, sit back and relax, letting your driver do all the work. Nothing unusual in that, you might think. But there’s a difference. There really is no driver. Only you are in the car and you are not anywhere near the steering wheel (if there is one by then). The car simply drives itself safely to your intended destination, drops you off and then parks itself.

Science fiction? No, it is already happening - bit by bit. Some experts think that self-driving cars will be commonplace by 2026 - a full 10 years ahead of the narrative mentioned above. Such is the pace of progress in this exciting field. Ford executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. said last year that driver-less technology is essential to cope with the expected global proliferation of vehicles from today’s one billion to four billion by 2050.

Self-parking cars are already a reality. Certain models of the Toyota Prius, for example, are equipped with a parking assistance system which will guide the car into tight parking spots without the driver needing to handle the steering wheel. However, the driver should still be in the car, operating the brake pedal. Swedish car-maker Volvo has taken it one step further, where the driver can get off the car and let the car park itself.

The Volvo system lets the driver get out and use a smart-phone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Such autonomous parking could be provided especially at places like shopping centres and airports. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. The system is five to ten years from commercial deployment.

Contribution

The biggest contribution to the driver-less car revolution has come from an unlikely source which is not a car company at all. Google, with its wide experience in mapping the world’s streets, has pioneered driver-less car trials in several states of the USA. Seeing one of Google’s experimental, driver-less Toyota Prius cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. While Google essentially expects car-makers to adopt its technology down the road, car-makers themselves do not want to be left behind.

BMW, for example, has been testing driver-less cars on roads around Munich. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles. The BMWs also use Radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and Lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The Lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit.

A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. A set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW expects to include “highly automated” driving functions in its models from 2021.

Regulators and Governments around the world are warming up to the idea of having driver-less cars on the road. The British government last week revealed plans to allow driver-less cars to be tested on UK roads by the end of the year.

This means that an Oxford University team which has been testing autonomous car technology with a Nissan Leaf on private land will be able to continue with its work on public roads. The team made the news earlier this year with its RobotCar, which features a low-cost autonomous system operated using a trunk-based computer that communicates with the driver via an iPad.

However, there are many other hurdles which should be overcome before fully autonomous cars can take to the road in larger numbers. The cars should be able to communicate with each other. A number of car-makers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their weight, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely. Ford recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast which illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend.

Limits

The cars should also be able to “read” traffic signs such as signals and speed limits. Interactive road signage systems are being worked out, but scientists hope that autonomous, communicating vehicles will not even need traffic signals. The Autonomous Intersection Management Project, created by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, imagines cities where traffic lights no longer exist but sensors direct the flow of traffic.

Parking will also be a breeze, because the cars can drive off to a designated parking lot without clogging up city streets. All cars are likely to come with a manual override, where a human take over especially in an emergency or if the driver wants to feel the pleasure of driving manually.

This brings into question certain ethical implications surrounding driver-less cars. As Wall Street Journal editor Michael Hickens points out, machines cannot have instincts. “The same kind of ethical calculation will have to be made regarding driver-less cars that get involved in accidents: ram into the old lady, or crush the baby stroller? Human drivers have instincts, but machines have to have logic programmed in ahead of time.”

However, given the passage of time and the relentless march of technology, future cars will have some sort of artificial or robotic intelligence that will help them to make just such decisions. Some cars can already identify between humans and inanimate objects in their path very accurately.

There is another dimension - literally - to the whole scenario. Will cars stay on the road forever? How about the sky? With the first flying car coming out in 2015, the sky could be abuzz with flying cars by 2036 as depicted in the hit movie The Fifth Element. And they too are likely to have some sort of autopilot, just like the big airplanes do today. That will indeed take autonomous cars to a whole new level.