The AutoNOMOS team at Freie Universität Berlin led by Raul Rojas has shown a demo of their robocar acting as what I have called a whistlecar. Their latest car, named "Made in Germany" performed an autonomous taxi pickup for the press which you can see played out in this video.

They've built a wireless interface to their car, and in the demo, a developer uses an iPad application to send his GPS coordinates to the car and command it to come to him at a hotel's entrance. The vehicle (which has been given more detailed maps including a map of the parking lot it is waiting in and the driveway of the hotel) then moves entirely vacant along streets to stop at the hotel entrance. Using the developer interface, they are also able to watch the car on the map as it moves to the hotel, and play out diagnostics on the iPad.

The FU-B team has been quite fond of wireless interfaces. Earlier this year for fun they built an iPhone app to access the drive-by-wire controls of their car so you could steer the car from outside using the iPhone. This is fun, but also in some ways a step back since the car has the ability to drive itself. Remote controlled cars are unexciting in comparison.

What is a major milestone for AutoNOMOS is that they have the confidence to operate Made in Germany entirely vacant on quiet city streets around their university, with the human supervision done by somebody with a remote control outside the vehicle. I would presume the vehicle, if it loses wireless connectivity, stops and attempts to assume a safe state, at least for now. Rojas says they haven't done this very often, doing most testing on closed courses.

The whistlecar vision is an important one, I believe, for several key reasons. First, it may be deployable before robocars are considered safe enough to carry people at a speed they would accept, and as such it's one of the incremental steps on the roadmap. Secondly, it enables car delivery, car sharing and autonomous refueling/recharging/servicing. By delivering a shared car that is the right car for a particular trip, transportation can become an order of magnitude more efficient than it is today when everybody rides alone in a sedan or SUV no matter what the trip.