Timothy B. Lee argues accident rates can be dramatically lowered through the introduction of autonomous automobiles.

Timothy B. Lee has a wonderfully in-depth and postive article about self-driving cars called “The Future of Driving, Part II: Life after driving” on ars technica. Here’s an excerpt on how driverless cars will cause fewer accidents.

In short, a car that drives as well as the best human drivers would save tens of thousands of lives in the United States and hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. And most likely, we’ll be able to do even better than that. Computers have much faster reaction times than humans do, and they will be “looking” in all directions simultaneously. Self-driving cars may be able to avoid many of the mistakes that even experienced human drivers make. They won’t have blind spots, they’ll have better sensors, and they will be able to react almost instantaneously to unexpected problems, giving them the ability to recover from dangerous situations that no human driver could have handled.

It’s really worth reading all the way through as he goes into great detail about how autonomous automobiles will affect human safety, reduce the cost of transportation, spur taxi service in the future, give back tens of billions of hours of our time to us, and transform the retail business.

Nissan - BR23C Robot Car

Thai Automaxx has an article up on the latest collison avoidance technologies at Nissan entitled “Nissan announces RB23C – Crash avoidance robotic car inspired by flight of the Bumblebee.” At CEATEC Japan 2008 Nissan unveiled the BR23C Robot Car, a robotic micro-car that mimics the instincts of a bumblebee to avoid accidents. It is set-up as the last line of defense in Nissan’s Safety Shield, and is designed to react in the blink of an eye. According to Toshiyuki Andou, Manager of Nissan’s Mobility Laboratory:

“The split second it detects an obstacle, the car robot will mimic the movements of a bee and instantly change direction by turning its wheels at right angles or greater to avoid a collision.

“The biggest difference to any current system is that the avoidance maneuver is totally instinctive. If that was not so, then the car robot would not be able to react fast enough to avoid obstacles.”

The article does not say when we might see this technology in production models, but hopefully the results of this project will create a safer car that can navigate past even the most seemingly unavoidable obstacles.

Your bus ride may soon be getting a lot smoother. According to the Wired.com article “Look Ma, No Hands! Automated Bus Steers Itself,” California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (California PATH) have developed a magnetic guidance system that will allow a bus to steer itself. Bus driver’s still control acceleration and braking.

Magnetic guidance technology uses magnetic markers embedded every 1.2 meters (4 feet) down the center of the lane and onboard sensors to track them. Alternating the polarity of the magnets creates a code that a computer aboard the bus reads to determine the buses’ latitudinal and longitudinal position. A bus doing 60 mph can process data from 88 feet of roadway in less than one second, and the system is robust enough to withstand real-world abuse, says Wei-Bin Zhang, who leads the project. “Today’s demonstration marks a significant step in taking the technology off the test track … towards deployment onto real city streets,” he says.

In addition to smoother rides, the magnetically guided bus can reliably stop much closer to curbs than human drivers, in some cases stopping only 1cm from the curb. The article does not state whether these buses will be hitting real bus routes anytime soon, however the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority has taken a look at the project and determined it would cost significantly less than a new light rail system.

IBM has just completed a report entitle “Automotive 2020: Clarity beyond the chaos.” The report details the widespread changes the automotive industry is expected to go through during the next twelve years, and how automakers can position themselves for success. Along with the sophistication of the consumer and the need to reach for expertise outside the industry, the report also goes into the progress of the intelligent vehicle:

The vehicle of 2020 will be a communications wonder. As another node on the Internet, it will connect with other vehicles (V2V connectivity), the transportation infrastructure (V2I) and to homes, businesses and other sources (V2x).

Road detection, self-repair, speech recognition, traffic regulation, age-focused assistance, autonomous parking, route optimization and more are explored as the researchers focus on safety, driver assistance, and service. They estimate that by 2020 all vehicles will have some level of connectivity, however the rate of progress depends a lot on the adoption of industry-wide standards. They ultimately predict that although we will not see a fully autonomous vehicle by 2020, we will be well on our way to achieving that vision.

From right-to-left, how the Side Collision Prevention system works.

Nissan has unveiled two new technologies to help drivers avoid collisions and details them in the “NISSAN PREVIEWS ALL-AROUND ‘COLLISION FREE’ PROTOTYPE” press release. The two new systems are Side Collision Prevention (SCP) and Back-up Collision Prevention (BCP) which incorporate the Distance Control Assist (DCA) and Lane Departure Prevention (LDP) systems when a driver attempts to change lanes or back out of a parking space. Both use sensors and drive-by-wire to prevent acccidents. Here’s a description of how the Back-up Collision Prevention will work:

During a reversing maneuver, rear and side-mounted sensors detect objects in the path of the vehicle. If an object is detected an alarm sounds followed by the activation of the brakes, to help avoid a collision in situations such as when a vehicle is backing out of a parking space.

The press release gives no information about when these technologies will be available or what cars will have them, but hopefully they will be helping make our roads safer soon.

Wired has an interesting article up titled “Tom Vanderbilt’s Why We Drive the Way We Do Unlocks How to Unclog Traffic”. In it, Tom talks about what made him decide to write Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). The article talks about some of the fundamental problems with auto traffic, including people making decisions for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the system as a whole:

A typical puzzle: Waiting for an on-ramp metering light — a mild and remarkably effective congestion-control measure — has been proven to rankle drivers more than merging directly into a traffic jam. “What bothers people is that they can see traffic flowing smoothly,” Vanderbilt says. “So they think, ‘Why should I wait?’ They tend not to accept that the traffic is flowing smoothly precisely because of the metering light.”

The article eventually comes to the conclusion that a highly networked system in which cars behaved similar to packets of information flowing along the information superhighway would be optimal, however people would never stand for it. The lesson? Until people are willing to give up the steering wheel, expect to see congestion continue.

A dashboard display tells you how fast to drive to avoid a red light.

What if your car told you how fast to drive to avoid a red light? Even better, what if the traffic lights talked to the cars in order to better time their light changes. According to the KickingTires article “Audi Takes on Stop Lights: A Must Read”, Audi is partnering with the government of Ingolstadt, Germany to network the traffic signals together with specially-equipped cars in order to deliver optimum light switching and assist cars through traffic lights. The initiative is being pushed as a gas-saving measure, as less stopping means less gas used. The article doesn’t go too much into the technical details of the project, however it does have some pictures of the car dashboard.

A laser outlines the edge of the road.

Squinting to see the lines on the road during fog or rain may soon one day become a thing of the past. CNN.com reports in the article titled “Futuristic windshield aims to help older drivers” that GM is currently researching a windshield that will use lasers, infrared sensors, and a camera to point out road markings, edges of the road, and even obstacles in the vehicles path.

The researchers are mainly targeting this system toward older drivers who can not see the road as clearly, but it’s easy to see this technology being useful for all drivers. And who knows, maybe the technology that helps us more easily spot road edges could one day be used to help our future automated chauffeurs spot them as well.

According to the Wired.com article “People Love Hybrids Enough to Actually Pay for Them”, as gas prises rise people are becoming more willing to invest in hybrid cars, even if it will cost them an extra $5,000 over a solely gas-powered counterpart. Unfortunately, they are a lot less willing to pay extra for collision-mitigation systems. According to Mike Marshall, director of automotive emerging technology at J.D. Power:

“As soon as the vehicle starts doing something for you with respect to the driver,” Marshall says, “that’s when there’s a lot of concern among respondents.”

With plenty of driver-assisting technology currently being created by automakers, how can they best assure concerned drivers of the safety in handing over the reins to the car itself?

Your car may soon be able to read road signs better than you can. The “Traffic Sign Recognition and Lane Departure Warning” developed by GM scans the road ahead of you at a speed of 30 frames per second and can not only read road signs but also tell when your car drifts away from the lane. Here’s a bit more technical info from the Wired.com article “All-Seeing Car Reads Road Signs For You”:

The system uses two processors and a camera — called, appropriately, the Front Camera System — mounted near the rear-view mirror. One processor identifies familiar shapes, symbols and digits on common road signs and conveys the information to the driver via a digital display in the gauge cluster. The other alerts the driver when he or she strays from the lane.

While the current system only presents information to the driver, it doesn’t seem to far-fetched to think this technology could be used to alert an autonomously-driven car to changing speed limits or upcoming curves.