The Future of Computers and Cars

If you remember the movie "I, Robot", starring Will Smith, you saw his futuristic Audi which had the ability to drive autonomously or manually. Now, the practicality of that idea is already in the present, but its implementation is quite the contrary.

When you think of autonomous cars, you imagine a car that will drive for you, (1984 anyone?). Well this would involve a large transportation system, involving the federal and state government which would take years to be implemented. You cannot simply give a car a mind of its own and tell it to take you to the hairdressers, or the local bar. It requires today's technologies, involving wireless communication, all surrounding a new idea called "Vehicle Infrastructure Integration". Depicted from the article "Toward the autonomous car", found here, VII was said to be available to the public in three to five years, mind you that the article was written in 2005. Needless to say, the idea of this massive system to be implemented across America will be slow-going and excessive beyond the governments necessities at our current time.

The roadway itself, nicknamed the intelligent highway, will use a mind-boggling amount of computers to manage traffic. The current idea would be for both the vehicles and the roadway to communicate with each other and be able to tell the vehicle when to speed up, slow down, brake, steer and so on. The theory of the autonomous car is absolutely practical, but this comes at a price. If this system was implemented, there would be a mix of robotic cars driving along with conventional cars with aggressive and unpredictable drivers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a 2007 competition involving robotic cars that can drive autonomously called the Urban Challenge. This article goes over information regarding the issues DARPA is approaching with this challenge. They stated that if this challenge showed to be successful toward an improvement of autonomous cars, there would be a great future for its practice.

We have still yet to see much prosperity to this idea, but it is still in it's planning and analysis stage. Like I said before, this would be an enormous system to be implemented, and it should be tested to the fullest to see if the world is ready for cars that will drive us around like chauffeurs.