A system that improves the precision of GPS in cities by 90 percent 2013-02-21 The margin of error of a commercial GPS, such as those that are used in cars, is about 15 meters in an open field, where the receiver has wide visibility from the satellites. However, in an urban setting, the determination of a vehicle’s position can be off by more than 50 meters, due to the ...

UK Unveils Affordable Self-Driving RobotCar – IEEE Spectrum 2013-02-21 Different levels of autonomy in vehicles: Full autonomy: This is what Google has: the car drives itself, and can react to changes and emergency situations. Driver optional. Restricted full autonomy: Stanfords Audi TTS is fully autonomous, but only in specific situations: it can handle all kinds of roads that it has maps for, but not variables like ...

Superior benefit-to-cost ratios of intelligent traffic systems 2013-02-15 Many types of intelligent traffic systems offer a superior benefit-to-cost ratio than the physical expansion of roads: – “Traditional” road capacity (2.7) – Electronic freight management system (2.8-3.6) – Dynamic curve warning (4.2-6.6) – Commercial vehicle information systems and networks (2.0-7.5) – Maintenance decision support system (1.3-8.7) – Intelligent traffic management (14.0) – National real-time traffic information system (25.0) – Road weather management ...

Google’s Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car — Part 4: How Google Wins – Forbes 2013-02-15 The Google car is the work of a mere 12 engineers, and the company has spent perhaps $50 million on the project. To put this amount into context, it is less than .0003 percent of Google’s revenue over the course of the program. It is also less than a third of what car makers have ...

Ford’s open-source kit brings era of smart car apps – tech – 24 January 2013 – New Scientist 2013-01-28 MIRROR, signal, manoeuvre – now set your engine to "supercar". Car maker Ford has just released OpenXC – an open-source hardware and software toolkit that will let the hacker community play around with the computer systems that run modern cars. While the first apps may add nothing more exciting than internet radio, the open nature ...

Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup – The Car – NYTimes.com 2013-01-14 Four manufacturers — Volvo, BMW, Audi and Mercedes — have announced that as soon as this year they will begin offering models that will come with sensors and software to allow the car to drive itself in heavy traffic at speeds up to 37 miles per hour. The systems, known as Traffic Jam Assist, will ...

Should We Tax People for Being Annoying? – NYTimes.com 2013-01-10 Republican economists, like Mankiw, normally oppose tax increases, but many support Pigovian taxes because, in some sense, we are already paying them. We pay the tax in the form of the overcrowded roads, higher insurance premiums, smog and global warming. via Should We Tax People for Being Annoying? – NYTimes.com. Pigovian tax