This autonomous off-road vehicle navigates rough terrain. It has not collided with another vehicle in 5 years operation and has no steering wheel for human override:
http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=7658 Mind you it's not the fastest, 10 km/year. Back on earth, it's a matter of horse for courses. If a driverless taxi with no steering wheel arrived to take me 5 km across town I'd get in. i think this sort of commodity task will come first. I think the primary push into driverless cars will not the oo-ah of a robot driver but will be economic: lower cost driverless vehicles owned by a fleet manager. A lot of people would be happy to not own a car. Or not own the second car which is used around town. This kind of capability is more or less available now in terms of technology but there are social, legal, political, acceptance, investment and production steps still to sort out. The technology will improve. At the far end, there are some driving tasks that will stay with human for a long time, maybe for ever, eg ambulances, transporting non standard things to non standard locations, picking a camping site. Machine vision can distinguish between the road and the ditch but it can't look into the operators head. Anything where the vehicle positioning is more than an A-to-B trip may need human intervention. (At least until the robots do the whole job, say drive to the accident site, clean up the mess, generate the human error story, collect the bodies and bring it all back to base.) Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
