No More in Control

For many of us, commuting in a car means precious time lost each day, sitting at the wheel with nothing to do except dodging the traffic ...

For many of us, commuting in a car means precious time lost each day, sitting at the wheel with nothing to do except dodging the traffic and playing footsie with the brakes and the accelerator.

But what if you could read, shave or watch TV while you drove to work – because your car is driving itself? Sounds good na? But why let a machine take control of our driving? For starters, over 90 per cent of accidents are caused by human error and not mechanical failure.

So doesn’t it make sense to let an equipment take orders from humans? These driving’ gizmos don’t get sick, drunk, don’t do drugs or have fights with their spouses. They operate the same way, day after day, under all kinds of conditions.

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Engineers at U C Berkeley (USA), along with auto-makers and road builders, have joined forces to design such a revolutionary transportation system. Dubbed as the electronic chauffeur,’ the automated highway system will employ technologies from radar to infra red to simple magnets which willindependently navigate your car with the flick of a switch.

The engineers are narrowing it down to a question of how much intelligence will reside in the vehicle and how much will reside in the roadway – the infrastructure. Automated cars will travel in a designated lane.

Communication between the car computers will ask permission to enter, and when the platoon of cars travelling have an opening, they signal yes’ and control is turned over to your car.

Engineering a system this complex requires making the cars work more like humans. The computer will have a brain, not a very smart one, but one that’s very attentive and doesn’t get distracted. It will have a kind of a nervous system, which will understand the messages brought by the cables from the engine, the wheels, the transmission. And it will have something akin to muscles in the form of the actuators, which apply the brakes, turn the steering, and push the throttle!

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To reach their goals, two very large sets of problems need to be solved. First,programming the cars to interface correctly with the road, and then to interact correctly with each other.

Engineers are working on a proposed design for the roadway system. Their plan uses a series of magnets installed in the road in combination with sensors on the vehicle. Then your car just follows the invisible dotted line. One magnet would be put every 1.2 meters on the roadway, which is the marker that defines the road for the computer to use to navigate the system.

Preliminary tests of this roadway interface have been so successful they have yet to find a human driver that can navigate the track as accurately as the computer.

Automated highways are expected to handle three times the cars by maintaining closer following distance, consistent speeds, and rapid adjustments that exceed human response time. At almost 50 times a second, the computer calculates and receives information coming from the car in front, relays its own information to the car behind it, then it adjusts its ownactuators.

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Another advantage of these systems is that the computers and the sensors don’t rubberneck. If there’s an accident off to the side of the road, or if the cops have pulled somebody off for a violation, the system just keeps on going.

Sound too futuristic for your lifetime? Well, car manufactures in some foreign countries have been acclimating automated controls over the past decade, so that it will help the drivers get used to these systems by the time the road is ready.

The technology will be ready to go by the new millennium. But are we ready to turn over our control to a computer?