What's Next for Drivers?

Gee you do some serious net lurking Pete, you should put your hand up as a mod or tech blogger for CR4.

Most of the stuff you find is pretty cool if not sometimes disturbing,,

Interesting to note one of the headings was "Infrastructure essential" if that's the case it won't be viable in Oz for an awfully long time. We'll be driven in automated hover cars by then...

Good article

Gee! Maybe they will use this on race cars to avoid crashes. When the day comes where I will no longer have complete control of the car, is the day I quit driving.

When the day comes where I will no longer have complete control of the car, is the day I quit driving.

I'm afraid that day has already arrived. With dynamic stability control and roll over control, the car systems take over to prevent your control inputs from causing the car to slide/spin out or roll over. The same has been true with ABS for decades. Your control input is not the same as the signal sent to the brakes.

Just think some day you will just get in and tell it where you wish to go. Won't need nothing to keep you awake. Just nap until you get there. Until then they will conceive all kinds of devices to keep you safe. If the device saves one life then its done its job. You think saving a life is going too far? Are you in your driving skills beyond the need of such a device? You maybe but not everyone is. Have already seen first hand. The out come of a professional truck driver. That fell asleep at the wheel and plowed through stopped rush hour traffic on the interstate. Of the 12 or so cars only 2 people were hurt. The truck driver and a UPS truck driver. The UPS truck took the bulk of the impact. Sheared the back of the UPS truck off from middle of the rear door to about half way up.

I still remember the fear in the eye's of about a four year old in the back seat of one vehicle. You don't have to be physically injured to be hurt.

"Just think some day you will just get in and tell it where you wish to go."

Conversely, like a bus or train or plane, you could get on and travel to where it is going. If the route is planned, and guided, there is no reason that this can't be a safer idea.

Chris

That day has already come. When I need to go somewhere, I climb in the auto and tell it where I want to go. Actually, it is even better than this. If the car gets stuck in a traffic jam, I just get out and walk a block or so to find a clear avenue, climb in to another car, and tell it where I want to go. When I arrive at my destination, I hand the driver the appropriate fare, and go about my business- no need to drive about looking for a parking place, etc. The only real problem is that these taxis are virtually impossible to find when it is raining...

Oh, yes- I don't have to pay insurance, and if there is a fender bender, I can just walk away with no liability at all...

For a few seconds there I thought you were talking about Grand Theft Auto.

To stray back to the topic, there's a Stanford guest lecture on YouTube by Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things. (Lecture called "The Design of Future Things," and I must say it's a little light on the substance, but thought-provoking.)

He suggests that when/if we finally get autonomous cars, we can do away with lanes. Lanes are just guidelines (literally), after all. When cars start knowing where the others are, they can self-guide through the swarm to your destination. Now that would be "thrilling" to observe.

It's blatantly obvious that the vibrating steering wheel is the most user-friendly and effective cue (versus a vibrating seat or a mobile phone signal) in the cited experiment. It places the warning signal right in the control mechanism and is as intuitive as possible, making corrective action as quickly available as possible.

I'm curious as to the rules of detecting when the car is unintentionally leaving the lane. The guessing of user intention is just about the hardest thing for programmed logic to do.

Like all human inventions, our cars will only get as smart as we are.

Toyota can't be 100% with acceleration control.

If steering control is attempted...?

The story was as they were driving the car ahead veered off the roadway out into a field. The witnesses stopped to render aid and ran out to the car when the driver announced that the turn indicator stuck...

Soon to be no joke eh?

This application is many years ahead of us I believe. Years back the shuttle had 5 computers running in parallel at all times - real redundancy! AI has a long ways to go before the reliability is there for consumer goods.

Maybe they should just cut a grove down the center of each lane, then all cars could have a little pin or tab that would fit down into the grove and they would all follow the slot... Wait a minute, I think this has already been done...

Often times, when building a road in this neck of the woods, the pavers will place lateral grooves along the edge of the the tarmac. The idea is that the driver, upon feeling the bumpiness of the edge, will wake up and resume driving.

The method requires no electronics and minimal effort on the part of the paving contractor. It even makes the steering wheel jiggle. Nah - too simple.

QL