That’s what Nature is expecting to see, in its overview of the world of autonomous vehicles:
This summer, people will cruise through the streets of Greenwich, UK, in electric shuttles with no one’s hands on the steering wheel — or any steering wheel at all.
The £8-million (US$12-million) project, part of a larger study of driverless cars funded by the UK government, is just one of many efforts that seek to revolutionize transportation. Spurred in part by a desire to end the carnage from road accidents — about 90% of which are caused by driver error — the race is on to transfer control from people to computers that never doze at the wheel, get distracted by text messages or down too many pints at the pub.
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A tougher problem, says Thrun, is teaching the car how to respond to what he calls “the long tail of unlikely events”. Early on, he says, the Google team developed algorithms for handling frequent, obvious challenges such as intersections or rain-slicked roadways. But as the cars drove for thousands of kilometres, they recorded oddball events such as a plastic bag blowing across the motorway or a couch sitting in the middle of the road. “There were many more of those than we believed in the beginning,” says Thrun. The only way to handle such rare events has been to record them as they arise, devise responses with the help of high-powered machine-learning algorithms — and then test those solutions with simulations and yet more driving.
“If we do it long enough,” says Thrun, “the hope is that the software will be as safe as a human driver” — and eventually much safer. How long that will take remains an open question.
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Additional safety could come from equipping cars and trucks with Wi-Fi-like vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) radios, which would allow them to warn each other of dangerous situations such as a car running through a red light. That would give both driverless and human-operated vehicles time to steer clear.
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The concept has already been road-tested as part of the European Union’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment project, in which lines of cars followed bumper to bumper behind a truck, like ducklings tailing their mother. These road trains, or platoons, avoid catastrophic pile-ups because the V2V signals cues every car to hit the brakes at the same instant as the truck. And because of aerodynamics, the road trains saved at least 10% in fuel consumption.
Infographics and more at the link.