The little car is tootling around
Washington - pretty much on its own - when a police officer bolts into
the road ahead of it, almost within spitting distance of the Capitol
dome.
Carnegie Mellon University's autonomous car knows speed limits and where left turns are illegal.
What is the cop waving about? Hard to say. The car is being driven
by computers, and wild waving is a bit too complicated for them to
understand.
Passenger Jarrod Snider taps a button on the centre console and puts his hands on the steering wheel.
"Autonomous ready," the voice of the computer says a fraction of a second later, eager to take control again.
The ability of the vehicle cruising unnoticed among the tourists and
important people in pinstripes on Capitol Hill would shock most of
them. A ride in it also points to a few chinks in its armour.
The computers running the car, for example, can see the police
officer bustling into the middle of Constitution Avenue. But they
cannot figure out why he is doing it - and neither can the people
riding in the car. It turns out the officer wants to wave off a driver
in another car who was making an improper turn.
Could the car have handled it without Mr Snider's help?
"Yeah, it started to slow down before I took over," he says, "and as
he stepped out of our lane and walked across the street, the car would
have continued to go. The car obviously doesn't understand gestures
such as 'Stop here'."
If this car - a silver-grey Cadillac SUV converted to autonomous
driving by Carnegie Mellon University - looked the least bit odd, the
Capitol police would swarm after it with machine guns. It does not. But
it is bristling with technological weapons.
Two cameras - one pointing up at traffic signals, the other down at
lane lines - are hidden beneath a slight ridge added just above the
windshield. There is longer-range radar behind the Cadillac medallion
on the front grille and shorter-range radar behind the front bumper. A
pair of laser beams peer out from that bumper. Unseen behind tinted
windows near the back seat, from unobtrusive boxes that match the
Cadillac's tan interior, a radar and a laser beam look out to each
side. From the rear bumper, more radar and lasers.
All of them feed into a bank of four computers hidden in the
spare-tyre well beneath the rear floor of the vehicle. The computers
also get GPS data and mapping feeds. They know speed limits and where
left turns are illegal and where right turns on red are okay. If one
computer fails, the others take over and the person behind the wheel
gets an alert.
Driverless cars are coming to the US and the rest of the globe, says
Carnegie Mellon professor Raj Rajkumar, who directs the project.
The next one coming in assembly-line cars - within three to five
years - will be a highway pilot feature, he says. Put the car in the
correct lane, tell it to go to San Francisco, and it will. A year or
two later, highway "plus-plus" will arrive, allowing that San
Francisco-bound car to weave around the slowpokes along the way.
In the same time frame - three to four years - look for traffic-jam
assist capability. The car will take over the driver while inching
through bumper- to-bumper traffic and alert him to take back control
once there is clear sailing.
"The totally driverless version will happen in the 2020s," Prof
Rajkumar says. "But the whole process will be incremental. More and
more scenarios that we drive in will become automated, and one fine day
you've given up complete control, but you don't even notice."
