"In the future it will be forbidden for safety reasons for people to drive cars," predicted Raul Rojas, professor at Berlin’s Free University (FU). "The cars of today are the horses of yesterday."

via Coming Soon to a Highway Near You: Driverless Cars | How to avoid sacrificing liberty for security.

Counterpoint: Freedom Über alles

if the car was doing 6 MPH over the speed limit, who would get the ticket? He said it would not be possible for the car to exceed the speed limit.

Being a thinker, I wondered what about if one of the lights were out in the car, also a violation? What if the speed limit had changed due to construction? Anyone that has a modern GPS will realize the speed limits displayed on them are not always up to date. Then there is inclement weather, such as fog.There are any number of statutory issues when you take the human driver out of the equation yet still have a motor vehicle moving on a roadway.

Fortunately, all the Florida bill will do is allow for testing.

If we lose the ability to travel as we please, which our vehicles allow, then we’ve lost essential liberty.

BMW announced its ConnectedDrive Connect technology for a semi-autonomous car in Aug. 2011, according to MotorSixty, but has just recently released a video showing of the new wheels.

via BMW Showcases Driverless Car in New Video | TheBlaze.com.

BMW semi-autonomous car, auf Deutsch!

MotorSixty states that the system works on highways that have been pre-mapped by the manufacturer so the computer knows where the car and nearby objects are located. MotorSixty compares technology to “advanced cruise control” but states when someone may be going to slow on the autobahn, “it looks for an open lane where it can safely merge at speeds up to 130 km/h (81 mph).”

More people working on autonomous cars: Ford, Volvo

The SARTRE project (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) (earlier post) has recently completed the first successful test demonstration of a multiple vehicle platoon, with Volvo Car Corporation as the only participating car manufacturer. The test fleet included a lead truck followed by three cars driven entirely autonomously at speeds of up to 90 km/h (56 mph), with no more than a 6-meter (20-foot) gap between the vehicles.

via Green Car Congress: SARTRE project completes first successful on-road demo of multiple vehicle platooning.

European automakers pursue an evolutionary answer to Google’s experimental self-driving car.

via Europe's Driverless Car (Driver Still Required) – Technology Review.

“Driverless” technology will initially require a driver. And it will creep into everyday use much as airbags did: first as an expensive option in luxury cars, but eventually as a safety feature required by governments.

arXiv.org Search.

“city traffic” paper search on arxiv

Conference Alerts – Topic Listing.

Transportation conferences

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/images/0/0e/lim-IJRR2011.pdf

A recent survey (Schrank and Lomax 2007) estimates that the annual nationwide cost of traffic congestion is US$78 billion, including 4.2 billion hours in lost time and 2.9 billion gallons in wasted fuel.

Given the probability distributions of delays on segments, finding good paths requires more than a shortest-path computation, because the ‘optimal substructure’ property does not hold as explained in Nikolova et al. (2006a) (i.e. if the best path from S to T goes through X , it does not follow that the sub-path of this path from S to X is itself the best S–X path).

Stochastic motion planning and applications to traffic (2008, 2010, 2011)

I believe that we can use machine2machine or machine2people technology to create a platform to reduce resource wastage. E.g. using sensors and smart phones to match free parking spaces with those looking to park. What other applications could this platform have to reduce energy and resource usage?

via How can we use the "Internet of Things" to make cities more sustainable? – Quora.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php?title=Publications

Daniela Rus publications

Highlighted projects:
TrafficInfo: [src]
Guiding People and Robots with Sensor Networks: [src]
Coordinated Construction: [src]
Distributed Control Algorithms for Networked Mobile Robots: [src]
More: [src]