A few recent Robocar updates for you:

Google took its car down to the TED conference in Long Beach and did a few demo drives for people. In this mashable story you can catch some videos, inside and outside, of the car driving around a cone-based course on top of a parking lot near TED.

Toyota recently released a video with a vision of future transportation, including lots of self-driving cars in a city of the future. This short animated video has trucks in platoons and call-on-demand cars that come to your location and drive you around the city, or let you disengage and self-drive outside the automatic lane. In Toyota's city there are special lanes which have guide markers and also inductive powering of the electric cars. While the powering may be valuable, I believe that the special infrastructure vision is an old one, and there are already several demonstrations of driving on existing roads without modification.

Once such demonstration comes from the "Made in Germany" team which certainly likes to come up with demos to attract attention. In this case they combined a headband that reads EEG/EMG signals with the controls of their robocar for what they call Brain Driver. The car does most of the driving, but signals from the headband can be used to tell it to go left or right at intersections, or accelerate and brake. My general experience of such EEG headbands has indicated that getting 5 unambiguous signals like that quickly is a tough job from pure EEG, so I am curious if they added some EMG (muscle) to it.

The brain driver is just a demo, but it does show one interesting technology, which is the ability for robocar technology to allow a vehicle to be driven through a very, very simple user interface -- ie. just a few buttons or a joystick. I suspect that for people so disabled that they can only communicate via EEG -- that's majorly disabled -- it will be better to wait for a full robocar technology that doesn't require any human input for the driving part.

(Disclaimer: Google is a consulting client of mine.)