http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1403715.ece
From The Times
February 19, 2007
Days of the idiot behind the wheel are numbered
Mark Henderson in San Francisco
Cars are not the most dangerous things on the road; drivers are, a group of scientists says.
They believe that there are so many idiots behind the wheel that we would all be safer if cars were driven by robots.
Artificial intelligence, they claim, is safer than no intelligence at all a trait which the average motorist is apt to detect in many other road users. Technology will have advanced so much in the next 25 years that by 2030 cars controlled by artificial intelligence will be a desirable reality and a great improvement on those guided by humans, Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford University in California, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
His speculation is already familiar from fictional robotic vehicles such as Kitt, the star of the Knight Rider television series, to the 1997 horror film Trucks, in which driverless lorries descend on a small American town and frightens the wits out of the inhabitants.
Dr Thrun led the team that designed Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg that won a $2 million (£1.02 million) prize for self-driving vehicles organised by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) of the US Government.
The same group yesterday unveiled Junior, a VW Passat that will compete for the next Darpa challenge for cars that can steer themselves in an urban environment.
Today, we are in a state where a car can drive 100 miles, plus or minus, before human assistance is necessary, Dr Thrun explained. By 2010 we expect this to go to about 1,000 miles, and by 2020 to a million miles before any kind of incident would occur.
By 2030, roughly, we should be able to deploy this technology on highways, where we would improve human reliability by orders of magnitude.
Junior is designed to be capable of making many more decisions than Stanley, as the new robot will have to handle traffic and manoeuvres. The Darpa contest will be staged in November at an airfield in California. The robot cars will be expected to cover sixty miles in six hours. In the previous challenge, the robot vehicles had only to be able to sense static objects and steer around them on a desert course of more than 130 miles.
The task facing Junior will be much tougher: it must be aware of all moving objects and complete journeys in a simulated city environment in which other cars must be negotiated and traffic laws obeyed.
In the last challenge, it didnt really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush because either way youd just drive around it, Dr Thrun said. The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment.
Mike Montemerlo, another member of the Stanford team, said: This has a component of prediction. There are other intelligent robot drivers out in the world. They are all making decisions. Predicting what they are going to do in the future is a hard problem that is important to driving. Is it my turn at the intersection? Do I have time to get across the intersection before somebody hits me?
Controlling the entire vehicle, you have to be able to deal with an unpredictable environment 99 per cent of driving is easy, but getting robots to do that last 1 per cent safely is the issue.
Dr Thrun said that the technology was almost certain to have military applications, and could be used by the US Army as soon as 2015 perhaps 15 years before self-driven cars become available to civilians.
Kitt cars
-In 1995 two US researchers drove 3,000 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego in a Pontiac minivan that steered itself for 98.2% of the way
-In 1997 Ernst Dickmanns won the Philip Morris Research Prize for his Mercedes S-Class which completed a 1,000mile test run from Munich to Denmark 95% automatically
-In 2005 tests of an S-Class Mercedes with a radar-based brake system ended in a three-car pile-up, televised by a German broadcaster. It was later reported that the accident had been faked
-Kitt, the fictional robotic vehicle of the Knight Rider TV series popularised the robo-car idea
Source: Times database
From The Times
February 19, 2007
Days of the idiot behind the wheel are numbered
Mark Henderson in San Francisco
Cars are not the most dangerous things on the road; drivers are, a group of scientists says.
They believe that there are so many idiots behind the wheel that we would all be safer if cars were driven by robots.
Artificial intelligence, they claim, is safer than no intelligence at all a trait which the average motorist is apt to detect in many other road users. Technology will have advanced so much in the next 25 years that by 2030 cars controlled by artificial intelligence will be a desirable reality and a great improvement on those guided by humans, Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford University in California, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
His speculation is already familiar from fictional robotic vehicles such as Kitt, the star of the Knight Rider television series, to the 1997 horror film Trucks, in which driverless lorries descend on a small American town and frightens the wits out of the inhabitants.
Dr Thrun led the team that designed Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg that won a $2 million (£1.02 million) prize for self-driving vehicles organised by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) of the US Government.
The same group yesterday unveiled Junior, a VW Passat that will compete for the next Darpa challenge for cars that can steer themselves in an urban environment.
Today, we are in a state where a car can drive 100 miles, plus or minus, before human assistance is necessary, Dr Thrun explained. By 2010 we expect this to go to about 1,000 miles, and by 2020 to a million miles before any kind of incident would occur.
By 2030, roughly, we should be able to deploy this technology on highways, where we would improve human reliability by orders of magnitude.
Junior is designed to be capable of making many more decisions than Stanley, as the new robot will have to handle traffic and manoeuvres. The Darpa contest will be staged in November at an airfield in California. The robot cars will be expected to cover sixty miles in six hours. In the previous challenge, the robot vehicles had only to be able to sense static objects and steer around them on a desert course of more than 130 miles.
The task facing Junior will be much tougher: it must be aware of all moving objects and complete journeys in a simulated city environment in which other cars must be negotiated and traffic laws obeyed.
In the last challenge, it didnt really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush because either way youd just drive around it, Dr Thrun said. The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment.
Mike Montemerlo, another member of the Stanford team, said: This has a component of prediction. There are other intelligent robot drivers out in the world. They are all making decisions. Predicting what they are going to do in the future is a hard problem that is important to driving. Is it my turn at the intersection? Do I have time to get across the intersection before somebody hits me?
Controlling the entire vehicle, you have to be able to deal with an unpredictable environment 99 per cent of driving is easy, but getting robots to do that last 1 per cent safely is the issue.
Dr Thrun said that the technology was almost certain to have military applications, and could be used by the US Army as soon as 2015 perhaps 15 years before self-driven cars become available to civilians.
Kitt cars
-In 1995 two US researchers drove 3,000 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego in a Pontiac minivan that steered itself for 98.2% of the way
-In 1997 Ernst Dickmanns won the Philip Morris Research Prize for his Mercedes S-Class which completed a 1,000mile test run from Munich to Denmark 95% automatically
-In 2005 tests of an S-Class Mercedes with a radar-based brake system ended in a three-car pile-up, televised by a German broadcaster. It was later reported that the accident had been faked
-Kitt, the fictional robotic vehicle of the Knight Rider TV series popularised the robo-car idea
Source: Times database
