Self-Driving Cars
Note that this article is from 2007. Today, the 2010 Lexus HS250 will keep within its
lanes.
In the Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take Control
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/04tier.html
Findings
By JOHN TIERNEY
As the baby boomers cruise into their golden years, I have good news for them and for
everyone else in danger of being run over by these aging drivers. The boomers will
not be driving like Mr. Magoo. An electronic chauffeur will conduct them on
expressways, drop them at the mall entrance and then go park their cars.
If you doubt this prediction, I don't blame you. The self-driving car ranks right up
there with the personal hovercraft as the futurist vision that never comes true. In
1969, Disney unveiled Herbie the Love Bug; in 1940, Popular Mechanics promised a
car that would chauffeur you across America in a single day to visit Aunt Lillian.
At the 1939 Worlds Fair, the crowds at the General Motors Futurama exhibit saw
traffic speeding 100 miles per hour thanks to electronic help. Safe distance between
cars is maintained by automatic radio control, a voice explained as visitors looked
down on the vast diorama of the World of Tomorrow, complete with hangars for
dirigibles and landing decks for autogyros.
Does it seem strange? Unbelievable? the announcer intoned. Remember, this is the
world of 1960!
O.K., so they were a little off on the date. But today, finally, those electronically
spaced cars are on the highway. You can buy cars with adaptive cruise-control that
automatically slow down if the radar or laser detects you tailgating. Your car can
warn you when you stray across lane markings, and these kinds of sensors are
already being used experimentally in cars that drive themselves.
These smart cars still have their bugs, but engineers have made amazing progress the
past several years. In 2004, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
held its first Grand Challenge for driverless cars, none made it more than seven
miles. At Darpas next Grand Challenge, in 2005, five cars made it 132 miles to the
finish.
And then, last month, six cars completed a 60-mile course that was the grandest
challenge yet because they had to deal with traffic along the way.
These empty cars drove themselves around an Air Force base in Southern California,
finding parking spots, obeying stop signs, idling in traffic, yielding to other cars at
intersections and merging into traffic at 30 m.p.h. There was one accident and a few
near misses, but the cars engineers are so buoyed by the results that they're hoping
the next competition will be a high-speed race on a Grand Prix course.
Within five years, its totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work
reliably in several limited domains, says Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at
Stanford and head of its racing team, which won the 2005 Darpa competition and
finished second in last months. In five years he expects a car that could take over
simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go
traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver. In 20
years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning
over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges thats just an educated guess.
While he doesn't doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, he's not sure how many
humans will let them.
Some people wont ever want to yield control; others will worry that the first smart cars
will be like the early versions of Windows.
There will be many, many car-computer jokes involving the word crash.
But cars, unlike humans, will keep getting smarter. They will learn from their
mistakes. They will not get distracted by cellphone calls. They will not drive drunk.
Smart cars will never be infallible, but they don't have to be. They just have to be
better than the drivers who now cause more than 90 percent of traffic accidents and
kill a million of their fellow humans per year. Smart cars might make their debut in
special lanes where each car has to enter through a checkpoint (at highway speeds) to
make sure its systems are working properly. Drivers would be enticed with another
promise of smart cars: no traffic jams.
When a freeway filled with human drivers is operating at full capacity, Dr. Thrun
notes, the cars actually occupy less than 10 percent of the roads surface area. The
rest is empty space between cars. Smart cars could be grouped more closely together,
doubling or tripling the roads capacity, as engineers have demonstrated by running a
platoon of driverless Buicks, spaced just 15 feet apart, at 65 m.p.h. down Interstate 15
near San Diego.
When that experiment was done, in 1997, it seemed an impractical idea because the
cars were guided by magnets embedded in the road, and it was hard to imagine
building such smart roads across the country. But since then, cars have gotten so
much smarter that they can navigate old-fashioned dumb roads.
In the near future, guided not just by G.P.S. satellites but by high-precision internal
maps and inertial sensors, they'll know their position so precisely that they wont even
need lane markings for guidance. They'll communicate with other smart cars on the
road, enabling a swarm of closely spaced cars to move in unison and react more
quickly to problems than humans drivers could. A road system filled with these cars
wouldn't even need traffic lights the cars could just talk among themselves.
If, according to Moore's Law, computing power keeps doubling every couple years,
human drivers will soon be outclassed by computers just as chess players were. The
only question will be how long it takes humans to adapt to these new chauffeurs.
Some experts think smart cars wont become common before 2050, but Id bet on it
happening sooner.
And even if humans stubbornly cling to the steering wheel, they could still end up
sharing the road with smart cars. By around 2030, according to some believers in
Moore's Law, there will be computers more powerful than the human brain, leading to
the emergence of superintelligent post-humans. If these beings do appear, I have no
doubt how they'll get around. They'd never be stupid enough to get in a car driven by
a member of Mr. Magoo's species.
Next
Note that this article is from 2007. Today, the 2010 Lexus HS250 will keep within its
lanes.
In the Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take Control
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/science/04tier.html
Findings
By JOHN TIERNEY
As the baby boomers cruise into their golden years, I have good news for them and for
everyone else in danger of being run over by these aging drivers. The boomers will
not be driving like Mr. Magoo. An electronic chauffeur will conduct them on
expressways, drop them at the mall entrance and then go park their cars.
If you doubt this prediction, I don't blame you. The self-driving car ranks right up
there with the personal hovercraft as the futurist vision that never comes true. In
1969, Disney unveiled Herbie the Love Bug; in 1940, Popular Mechanics promised a
car that would chauffeur you across America in a single day to visit Aunt Lillian.
At the 1939 Worlds Fair, the crowds at the General Motors Futurama exhibit saw
traffic speeding 100 miles per hour thanks to electronic help. Safe distance between
cars is maintained by automatic radio control, a voice explained as visitors looked
down on the vast diorama of the World of Tomorrow, complete with hangars for
dirigibles and landing decks for autogyros.
Does it seem strange? Unbelievable? the announcer intoned. Remember, this is the
world of 1960!
O.K., so they were a little off on the date. But today, finally, those electronically
spaced cars are on the highway. You can buy cars with adaptive cruise-control that
automatically slow down if the radar or laser detects you tailgating. Your car can
warn you when you stray across lane markings, and these kinds of sensors are
already being used experimentally in cars that drive themselves.
These smart cars still have their bugs, but engineers have made amazing progress the
past several years. In 2004, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
held its first Grand Challenge for driverless cars, none made it more than seven
miles. At Darpas next Grand Challenge, in 2005, five cars made it 132 miles to the
finish.
And then, last month, six cars completed a 60-mile course that was the grandest
challenge yet because they had to deal with traffic along the way.
These empty cars drove themselves around an Air Force base in Southern California,
finding parking spots, obeying stop signs, idling in traffic, yielding to other cars at
intersections and merging into traffic at 30 m.p.h. There was one accident and a few
near misses, but the cars engineers are so buoyed by the results that they're hoping
the next competition will be a high-speed race on a Grand Prix course.
Within five years, its totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work
reliably in several limited domains, says Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at
Stanford and head of its racing team, which won the 2005 Darpa competition and
finished second in last months. In five years he expects a car that could take over
simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go
traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver. In 20
years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning
over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges thats just an educated guess.
While he doesn't doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, he's not sure how many
humans will let them.
Some people wont ever want to yield control; others will worry that the first smart cars
will be like the early versions of Windows.
There will be many, many car-computer jokes involving the word crash.
But cars, unlike humans, will keep getting smarter. They will learn from their
mistakes. They will not get distracted by cellphone calls. They will not drive drunk.
Smart cars will never be infallible, but they don't have to be. They just have to be
better than the drivers who now cause more than 90 percent of traffic accidents and
kill a million of their fellow humans per year. Smart cars might make their debut in
special lanes where each car has to enter through a checkpoint (at highway speeds) to
make sure its systems are working properly. Drivers would be enticed with another
promise of smart cars: no traffic jams.
When a freeway filled with human drivers is operating at full capacity, Dr. Thrun
notes, the cars actually occupy less than 10 percent of the roads surface area. The
rest is empty space between cars. Smart cars could be grouped more closely together,
doubling or tripling the roads capacity, as engineers have demonstrated by running a
platoon of driverless Buicks, spaced just 15 feet apart, at 65 m.p.h. down Interstate 15
near San Diego.
When that experiment was done, in 1997, it seemed an impractical idea because the
cars were guided by magnets embedded in the road, and it was hard to imagine
building such smart roads across the country. But since then, cars have gotten so
much smarter that they can navigate old-fashioned dumb roads.
In the near future, guided not just by G.P.S. satellites but by high-precision internal
maps and inertial sensors, they'll know their position so precisely that they wont even
need lane markings for guidance. They'll communicate with other smart cars on the
road, enabling a swarm of closely spaced cars to move in unison and react more
quickly to problems than humans drivers could. A road system filled with these cars
wouldn't even need traffic lights the cars could just talk among themselves.
If, according to Moore's Law, computing power keeps doubling every couple years,
human drivers will soon be outclassed by computers just as chess players were. The
only question will be how long it takes humans to adapt to these new chauffeurs.
Some experts think smart cars wont become common before 2050, but Id bet on it
happening sooner.
And even if humans stubbornly cling to the steering wheel, they could still end up
sharing the road with smart cars. By around 2030, according to some believers in
Moore's Law, there will be computers more powerful than the human brain, leading to
the emergence of superintelligent post-humans. If these beings do appear, I have no
doubt how they'll get around. They'd never be stupid enough to get in a car driven by
a member of Mr. Magoo's species.
Next
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