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Michael Taylor9 May 2012
NEWS

Calm down Google

...Autonomous Cars are already here

America's Casino State is gambling its driving future on self-driving cars, with Nevada yesterday becoming the first state in the world to grant a licence for an autonomous car.

There's no surprise that the licence has gone to Google, the tech giant which has used it lobbying muscle to convince the desert state to change its laws to accommodate its heavily modified Toyota Prius.

Carrying the number plate "AU 001", the Prius has already logged more than 300,000km testing in Nevada's Carson City on a provisional test arrangement and also tested on the Las Vegas strip.

But while Google is the first and most visible proponent of self-driving cars, it is hardly the first and the Nevada government's Autonomous Review Committee said yesterday that it expects more applications to test and develop cars on its roads.

Key figures pushing to the development of autonomous cars include General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Yet, apart from having the political clout to change the laws for self-driving cars, some autonomous-vehicle developers insist Google is only replicating work they've already done.

Outgoing BMW Director of Development, Dr Klaus Draeger, claimed last week that the technology for autonomous driving has already been in production cars for a generation.

"In some situations that are favourable, our cars can drive themselves today. There's no technical problem with that," the new board member in charge of BMW's supply and purchasing said in Sicily last week.

"It's not too risky in some situations with autonomous driving and it's clear that the limit is not the technology. We already have that.

"The limit is a legal situation that's different from country to country and that's only in Europe. It's much worse in most of the U.S.," he admitted.

He insisted a combination of the computer control of a modern car's brake and accelerator pedals, combined with electro-mechanical steering, lane-departure cameras and radar cruise control, all controlled by the same computer, meant the core tasks of autonomous driving were handled already.

"If you drive a modern premium car on the autobahn or motorway, with lane-departure warning switched on and the active cruise control switched on, it's more or less autonomous anyway, depending on the philosophy of the car company," he said.

"If there is a traffic jam on the motorway, for example, the car can recognise that and stop, restart when the traffic moves, stop, restart and stay in the lines without hitting anything.

"Autonomous is not far away at limited speeds in a traffic jam. That's the easy part, and we can always combine that with infrastructure information coming into the navigation computer."

And BMW has more experience at autonomous driving than most. It has had a fleet of semi-autonomous Track Trainer 330i models running around since 2007. The Track Trainers use cameras and a super-accurate satellite navigation system to help with driver training, with its party trick being the ability to run at 95 per cent of full race pace on any given track without any driver input whatsoever.

But while the hardware and software might be largely in place to take a big step towards autonomous driving, there were still hurdles, Dr Draeger warned.

"In the real world of Europe, it's a much harder task than wandering around Reno, Nevada, in a Google car.

"The roads are narrower, there are more pedestrians and scooters and bikes and all kinds of laws.

"The absolute key to it is the probability factor of detecting or not detecting someone or something with an autonomous driving car and determining fault," Dr Draeger insisted.

Yet Google satisfied Nevada's dreadfully named Autonomous Review Committee that it's Prius had that probability factor covered after demonstration tests along the freeways, highways and the Vegas Strip and Carson City's suburban streets, the Committee said in a press release yesterday.

"The committee approved the application (by Google) and is now creating the state's first autonomous testing business licence and licence plates for the international company," the release said.  "The licence plates displayed on the test vehicle will have a red background and feature an infinity symbol on the left side.

"I felt using the infinity symbol was the best way to represent the 'car of the future'," Department Director, Bruce Breslow, said. "The unique red plate will be easily recognized by the public and law enforcement and will be used only for licenced autonomous test vehicles.

"When there comes a time that vehicle manufactures market autonomous vehicles to the public, that infinity symbol will appear on a green license plate."

While Google has claimed the technical high ground as a result of its lobbying power, the fact is that plenty of premium modern cars already have the cameras and sensors needed to drive autonomously. They already detect errant pedestrians and match that information with sophisticated algorithms to determine which of them are in danger of coming into a car's path. Some even connect this with infra-red cameras to detect pedestrians beyond the driver's vision.

Yet, Dr Draeger warned, that software would need to be rewritten and expanded to cover all potential city hazards before true autonomous driving could be ready for sale.

"If you tried to do autonomous driving in the city where the situation changes in a relatively short time, where you have cars and pedestrians and cyclists and scooters and motorbikes and delivery vans and children, it's going to be pretty difficult not be held responsible if someone else does something wrong.

"In this regard, autonomous is further away than you think. The key will not be the first autonomous car, but the first autonomous car lawsuit."

Even if a car can safely negotiate all a city's hazards and protect those inside and outside itself, Dr Draeger predicts huge problems convincing mainstream politicians and the legal system of its true potential.

"With the Hydrogen 7 project, we had 100 cars and there was a discussion with governments and police about how many tests we had to do to prove we were not going to blow up the garages we parked in. Can you imagine what we need to do for an autonomous car?

"Also, we could convince everyone and do it with one state or country but have to turn it off when you crossed the border into another state or country."

If that seems odd, Dr Draeger insists such confusion already exists with cars that park themselves automatically.

"Reverse parking touches on something similar. The technology works for the car to do it itself, but we're not sure of all the legal situations in all the different countries. It's a related problem on a smaller scale."

There is a philosophical question about the ultimate responsibility with autonomous driving, and it's especially prescient for a car company that espouses driving pleasure at its core.

"The driver has to always be in control of the car. It does not matter if he drives or not but he has to be in control of the car. Pretty much the same applies to flying: if a pilot has autopilot on, the brain should still be switched on to flying.

"There are situations where driving is not a real pleasure, so why not let the driver relax and sit back while the car is doing that job anyway?

"But we know there are situations where the driver loves to do the job. In this situation we want to make sure he is not going to be over-ridden when he loves to do it himself."

Not all current technology would survive the move to autonomous driving, though, with the most notable change related to the way cars detected hazards in front of them.

"Currently we are driving more or less with radar sensors for active cruise control, but the problem with radar is that they have some problems detecting stationary targets.

"But we can change to another technology easily. We use radar because we don't need to detect stationary objects today," Dr Draeger insisted.

http://www.dmvnv.com/news/12005-autonomous-vehicle-licensed.htm

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Written byMichael Taylor
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