An MIT team has been working on a car that is "hard to crash." Called the intelligent co-pilot it is not a self-driving car, but rather a collection of similar systems designed to detect if you are about to hit something and try to avoid it. To some extent, it actually wrests control from the driver.
Vernor Vinge is perhaps the greatest writer of hard SF and computer-related SF today. He has won 5 Hugo awards, including 3 in a row for best novel (nobody has done 4 in a row) and his novels have inspired many real technologies in cyberspace, augmented reality and more.
A study is underway in Japan to build dedicated lanes for self-driving cars.
There have been experiments with dedicated lanes in the past, including a special automated lane back in the 90s in San Diego. The problem is much easier to solve (close to trivial by today's standards) if you have a dedicated lane, but this violates the first rule of robocars in my book -- don't change the infrastructure.
Hats off to the video embedded below, which was prepared for a futuristic transportation expo in my home town of Toronto.
Called the PAT (People and Things) this video outlines the UI and shows a period in the day of a robotic taxi/delivery vehicle as it moves around Toronto picking up people and packages.
An update on Robocar News:
Just returned from an overseas trip to Moscow, I am reminded of the rant I posted earlier about the constant interruptions on the in-flight entertainment system.
Everything I said before remains valid:
There's a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for example, has a project called MatterNet working to provide transportation infrastructure for light cargo in regions of Africa where roads wash out for half the year.
Closer to home, these drones are not yet legal for commercial use, while government agencies are using them secretly.
One of my first rules of robocars is "you don't change the infrastructure." Changing infrastructure is very hard, very expensive, requires buy-in from all sorts of parties who are slow to make decisions, and even if you do change it, you then have a functionality that only works in the places you have managed to change it. New infrastructure takes many decades -- even centuries, to become truly ubiquitous.
Like most people, I have a lot of different passwords in my brain. While we really should have used a different system from passwords for web authentication, that's what we are stuck with now. A general good policy is to use the same password on sites you don't care much about and to use more specific passwords on sites where real harm could be done if somebody knows your password, such as your bank or email.
I'm doing a former-cold-war tour this month and talking about robocars.
This Friday, May 11, I will be giving the 2301st lecture for the Philosophical Society of Washington with my new, Prezi-enabled robocars talk. This takes place around 8pm at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium. This lecture is free.
A week later it's off to Moscow to enjoy the wonders of Russia.
There will be a short talk locally in between at a private charity event on May 14.
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