Mercedes-Benz 'talking' robotic cars

Imagine your car pulls up right out the front of the restaurant, drops you and your passengers off, and then with simple hand gesture from you drives off autonomously to find a car park.

This is the future, says Mercedes, and the European car maker is already working with robotics experts to develop a new 'language' that will allow humans to communicate with their cars, and vice versa.

Mercedes-Benz has made no secret of its desire to be the world's first mainstream car maker to deliver a self-driving car, possibly as early as 2020, but is now providing a clearer picture of how the future of mobility could evolve.

The idea that motorists will be able to switch the car to self-drive mode, kick back and have a little kip or catch up on work or social media is not new, but Benz is already looking further down the road, so to speak, where owners can use hand signals to start their cars and even command them to meet further down the road.

Benz's Research and Futurology department recently met with robotics experts in Germany to discuss ways people could order their cars around, and hand gestures recognised by a multitude of sensors many cars already have, is one such example.

As the images show, owners will be able to beckon their cars or request they go and find a park with a hand gesture. Parked cars can even warn other pedestrians of fast-moving traffic, creating two-way communication.

Autonomous car technology has already divided opinion; some will embrace it, others will spurn it, but Mercedes-Benz is already pondering the ramifications of a future where traffic will be "largely dominated by cars that drive themselves", and in particular the way in which humans and machines communicate and cooperate.

"The traffic of the future will become increasingly interactive – and I don't just mean the networking of vehicles," stated Dr. Herbert Kohler, Head of Group Research and Sustainability and Chief Environmental Officer at Daimler AG.

"We view it as our elementary task to put autonomous cars on the road not just as technological achievements but also to make them an integral part of the traffic of the future. Here the social aspects are at least equally important as the sensors in the car," he said.

One of the most important social aspects of a future teeming with AIs and intelligent self-driving cars is communication, explains Daimler AG futurologist, Alexander Mankowky, suggesting new languages may result.

"The task is to develop a cooperative system in which one or more communication languages are essential to allow interaction between humans and machine intelligence in the dense urban environment," said Mankowsky.

Linguistics expert and an authority on gesture research, Prof. Dr. Ellen Fricke from the Chemnitz Technical University reckons that if cars and humans develop a new gesture-based language, it could influence culture and indeed the way humans communicate with each other.

"If we consider gestures to be an option for successfully communicating with autonomous cars, it is of course important to look at which human gestures in everyday use are especially suitable as a starting point for this. Another equally key question is this: how does the autonomous car shape us? And what effects will the gestures used for human-car interaction have on the gestures used for interhuman communication in the future?"

It may all sound like something from a sci-fi movie at the moment, but Mercedes-Benz is confident we'll see deeper interactions between car and driver in the near future, dubbing it "human-machine cooperation".

Indeed, the team has already been testing gesture control with robots via three interactive quadcopters (pictured wih Dr Fricke) that can be "hailed, stopped or steered in a certain direction using gesture control or a haptic control object," explains Mercedes.

The German car maker is not alone in its endeavour to push ahead with autonomous vehicle robotics and related technologies, with dozens of other companies – not all of them car manufacturers – testing self-driving systems in cars.