Driverless cars just around the corner
by Greg Hack, The Kansas City Star
America’s love affair with cars has been going on for more than a century. But if you’re one of those people who really hate driving, the future could belong to you.
Thanks to advances in sensors, GPS systems, electronic steering and computerized braking, cars have been developed that drive themselves. Researchers around the world — and in Kansas City — are working to make everyday use of driverless cars a reality. ……
Automotive systems have advanced to the point that current driverless projects include an Italy-to-China trek and a high-speed run up Pikes Peak — testing in extreme conditions to root out weaknesses and improve the systems’ reliability. Other research involves figuring out the best way to put the vehicles into widespread use. ….. •Self-parking systems. Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Toyota and Lexus offer models that will park themselves, according to Edmunds.com. BMW plans a 2011 model with the feature. •Adaptive cruise control. Besides keeping a steady speed, this system will slow a vehicle to keep a safe distance when coming up on a slower-moving car or truck. •Lane departure warning and prevention. A camera or radar recognizes lane stripes. When a driver starts to cross a line without activating a turn signal, the system gives a warning, such as making the steering wheel vibrate. If the vehicle drifts over a line, the system applies brakes on the opposite side of the drift to pull the car back over the line. •Blind spot warnings. Much like the lane departure system, this one “sees” when another vehicle is in your blind spot and activates a warning light. •Crash warnings. These systems tell you if your vehicle is approaching another too fast, and they can tighten seatbelts, heighten the brakes’ sensitivity and prepare the airbags for activation. •Stop-and-go driving. BMW offers “Active Cruise Control with Stop & Go,” which can stop a car in slow traffic and speed it up when the car in front of it starts moving again. Read more: Report
DCL: these control systems are event processing systems par excellence – but of course the manufacturers don’t call it that! Next generation systems will use CEP.
Currently available technology:
•Self-parking systems. Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Toyota and Lexus offer models that will park themselves, according to Edmunds.com. BMW plans a 2011 model with the feature.
•Adaptive cruise control. Besides keeping a steady speed, this system will slow a vehicle to keep a safe distance when coming up on a slower-moving car or truck.
•Lane departure warning and prevention. A camera or radar recognizes lane stripes. When a driver starts to cross a line without activating a turn signal, the system gives a warning, such as making the steering wheel vibrate. If the vehicle drifts over a line, the system applies brakes on the opposite side of the drift to pull the car back over the line.
•Blind spot warnings. Much like the lane departure system, this one “sees” when another vehicle is in your blind spot and activates a warning light.
•Crash warnings. These systems tell you if your vehicle is approaching another too fast, and they can tighten seatbelts, heighten the brakes’ sensitivity and prepare the airbags for activation.
•Stop-and-go driving. BMW offers “Active Cruise Control with Stop & Go,” which can stop a car in slow traffic and speed it up when the car in front of it starts moving again.
- August 10th, 2010
3 Responses to “Driverless cars just around the corner”
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In 2007 Volvo installed auto-braking systems overriding driver controls, activated when you are about to rear end the car in front or hit a stationary object. However the system is still not flawless:
http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/11052010/36/volvo-auto-brake-fails-during-demo-0.html
RUF seems like a bright idea to combine a car-on-track with trackless free-range driving. Driving on a track wold reduce complexity of on-board computers a great deal. The notion of totally automating a car on today’s road system is impractical and a waste of research money.
http://www.ruf.dk/
Already some years ago, we gave a – very “applied” – university course about edBPM together with colleagues from Audi, Deutsche Post, Hamburger Sparkasse and TeamBank:
http://www.citt-online.com/index.php?id=veranstaltungen&id3=industrieaufgaben&id4=more
http://www.citt-online.com/index.php?id=veranstaltungen&id3=exp06&id4=more
Together with Audi, we started a student project about NextGeneration Navigation Systems / Intelligent Cars based on CEP:
http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/myAudiNavigation.pdf
This first idea was actually born together with the showcase of my former BEA Systems colleague Paco Gomez as an automotive application combining BEA’s event server with location-based services.
The first student team of Katja Borschert, Robert Gottanka, Martin Schober and Christian Silberbauer adapted the showcase for the Audi use case. Later some PhD students like Thomas Ertlmair, Thomas Paulus, Christoph Emmerberger and Florian Springer added some use cases and transferred the showcase according to the new CEP solution from Oracle after the acquisition of BEA. We presented these project ideas a lot of times, internationally at the edBPM Expert Meetings in Regensburg, at the ServiceWave 2008 in Madrid, at our Haifa workshop/visit in Israel February 2009 and so on. Unfortunately, the crisis stopped a lot of projects worlwide. Now, at least Germany is booming again allegedly, especially the Automotive domain, so let’s start again…
In the meantime, we are enhancing the idea by ed(B)PM and U-CEP aspects with some more use cases. These use cases are based on the reference model and the first sketch of a taxonomy in http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/62750370.pdf as a determinstic approach based on in advance defined event patterns and reactions as a “concert” of collaborating processes, but also as a non-deterministic approach for so far unknown, but potentially interesting or critical event patterns based on additional AI- or neural network components. This would be our submission e.g. to the 3rd Workshop on Multimodal Interaction for Automotive Applications (MIAA) in conjunction with ACM IUI in Palo Alto next spring 2011. We will do it in cooperation with a large telco carrier probably.
Those ideas are an enhancement of such research project about driverless cars like Audi’s TTS “Shelley” http://www.silicon.de/hardware/server-desktops/0,39038998,41529810,00/audis+geisterhafter+tts+_shelley.htm
Interesting question to be discussed e.g. at our next edBPM/U-CEP expert meetings is also who would be the responsible of such enhanced intelligent machines or cyborgs or robots etc. in the case of problems or damages? CEP/ed(B)PM providers, EPL programmers, …?
http://www.silicon.de/lifestyle/interview/0,39038973,41530460,00/welche+rechte+und+pflichten+hat+ein+roboter.htm
(I’m sorry, but for 2 links you have to try your translation system if you are not a German speaker)
Cheers
Rainer