Cars - Driverless car

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	Cars - Driverless car

The driverless car is an emerging family of technologies, ultimately aimed at a full "taxi-like" experience for car users. This, together with Alternative propulsion is seen as the main technological advance expected leading into 2020. These projects are also referred to as an autopilot, autonomous vehicle, autodrive car, or an automated guided vehicle (AGV).

Driverless passenger programs include the FROG passenger vehicles from Holland, the ARGO research project from Italy, and the DARPA Grand Challenge from the USA. See also smart cars.

= The challenge = Though the vision of a fully-autonomous vehicle is clear it would be such an upheaval in technology and lifestyle that few dare contemplate a 'Big Bang' new technology that would simply do it. From a scientific/engineering point of view,this looks like a case of an AI-complete problem, meanning that it is so complex it "can never be done".

However, a few brave souls are attempting to solve bits and pieces of the problem—either for the benefit of the limited invention created, or explicitly as stepping stones towards a fully Driverless Car. Though most of the projects are government-sponsored, there is already a significant involvement from the private sector.

The challenges involved in realising this vision can broadly be divided into the technical and the social. The technical problems are broadly in the design of the sensors and control system required to make such a car work. The social challenge is in getting average drivers to trust the car, getting legislators to permit the car onto the public roads, and untangling the legal issues of liability for any mishaps with no person in charge.

Since the social issues have not been addressed in any concerted way yet, we will now turn to a discussion of the technologies, leaving the social issues to the end of this article.

The elements of any solution

The dream of a driverless car seems fantastic, and therefore remote. However, any solution can be broken down to four sub-systems:

Sensors: So the car can know where an obstacle is and what is around it.
Navigation: How to get to the target location from the present location.
Micro-navigation: Getting through the next few meters, steering, and avoiding obstacles while also abiding by rules of the road and avoiding harm to the vehicle and others.
Control of the vehicle itself: Actuating the decisions of the micro-navigation.

In examining every proposed solution, one should look at the following questions:

Is this truly a complete system? Does it drive itself door-to-door?
To what degree is the proposed solution a step towards the complete vision, or is it just a trick?
Is the car 'autonomous', or would it need changes to the infrastructure?
How feasible (technically, economically, and politically) would it be to deploy the entire solution?
Can the system allow for and include existing vehicles driven by humans, or does it need an open field?
How would it cope with unexpected circustances?

= Projects so far = The work done so far varies significantly in its ambition and its demands in terms of modification of the infrastructure. Broadly, there are three approaches. The first group to be discussed here is the fully-autonomous vehicles (DARPA, ARGO)—which are the most ambitious, but none are deployed. The second approach uses various enhancements to the infrastructure (either an entire area, or specific lanes) to create a self-driving closed system. Such systems already function in many airports, underground commuter railroads, and some European towns. The third approach is to incrementally remove requirements from the human driver, by various "assistance" systems. This approach is slowly trickling into standard cars (e.g. improvements to cruise control).

An important concept that cuts across several of the efforts is vehicle platoons. In order to better utilize road-space, vehicles are assembled into ad-hoc train-like "platoons", where the driver (either human or automatic) of the first vehicle makes all descisions for the entire platoon. All other vehicles simply follow the lead of the first vehicle.

Fully-autonomous

These technologies are the most ambitious: The allow a car to drive itself following a pre-set target, until it gets there all on its own. The downside of these seeming marvels is that they are very limted in terms of the environment in which they can operate: Either a desert (free of any Human or Human-mae obstacle), or a clearly-marked, well-painted (in our case Italian) motorway, or Autostrada as they would have it. Therefore, the real benefits of door-to-door are as remote as ever.

Free-ranging military vehicles

There are 3 clusters of activity relating to free-ranging off-road cars. All these projects are military-oriented.

US Military DARPA Grand Challenge

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