ENJOY SELF-DRIVING CARS TO AVOID CRASHES

A future full of self-driving cars may be awesome, terrifying or sad — it depends on whom you ask. But one group of researchers doesn’t want this to be an all-or-nothing choice: They are racing to develop the first robotic “co-driver” that works with human motorists. The robot takes over when it senses the car will hit something, saving the motorist from an accident, but otherwise allowing the human driver to make the decisions. Yet at the push of a button, the car is also able to drive itself, much like the Google car project.

“It’s capable of not just semi-autonomy and not just full autonomy. It’s capable of either,” said Sterling Anderson, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at MIT who created the system.

The benefit of the novel semi-autonomous mode is that it might show up in the market a bit earlier than a wholly self-driving car, Sterling thinks. The semi-autonomous system would be a major safety feature that requires fewer radical legal changes than a fully autonomous car does, he said.

[5 Ways Self-Driving Cars Will Make You Love Commuting]

Take a rest on the road

Today’s drivers must give up hours of their day to the daily drive back and forth from work. Tomorrow’s self-driving car owners can settle back in the comfort of their ride to get a start on work emails, browse the news headlines or catch up on a favorite TV show — all without worrying about getting lost, switching lanes on the highway or squeezing into tiny parking spaces.

“These kinds of systems will be to the point where you can flip a switch and they’ll be fully autonomous,” Stone told InnovationNewsDaily. “Many cars can already park themselves and have active cruise control.”

Goodbye to red lights

Traffic lights may go extinct once self-driving cars rule the road. Tomorrow’s self-driving cars could “talk” wirelessly using an automated system that calculates the paths for cars to make turns or whiz through intersections without stopping.

Such intersections could shrink average road delays by as much as 100 times in the most extreme circumstances, Stone said. He and his colleagues previously created a simulation showing cars streaming past one another at an intersection with only the slightest slowdowns in speed — a somewhat terrifying sight for today’s drivers. But such changes would only be possible once everyone owns a self-driving car.

“We found that most benefits of autonomous intersections don’t really kick in until most cars on road are autonomous [a 90 percent penetration level],” Stone explained. “But at every point along the way, we found small benefits for people with autonomous cars.”

Save on gas money

Early adopters of self-driving cars may find themselves stopping less often to fill up on gas (or recharge the batteries of electric or hybrid plug-in cars). That’s because a self-driving car could quickly and precisely calculate how much to step on the gas pedal or when to begin braking before a stop sign.

“You can imagine the ability of cars to accelerate or decelerate a lot more smoothly on our current roadways, so that they reduce fuel usage and emissions,” Stone said.

Some penny-pinching drivers already practice “hypermiling” techniques to avoid wasting fuel with excessive acceleration or braking. But self-driving cars could automatically spread such energy-saving habits to everyone.

Safer commutes

People on today’s roads face a gauntlet of distracted drivers, drunk drivers or sleepy drivers. Self-driving cars could go a long way toward eliminating such dangers by taking over control from addled, error-prone human drivers — especially if self-driving cars talk to each other to discuss road or traffic conditions.

The rise of self-driving cars could also reduce number of crashes and deaths among vehicle drivers and passengers. About 33,000 people die on U.S. roads each year, according to a AAA study conducted by Cambridge Systematics in 2011. Total U.S. crashes tacked on the added financial cost of almost $300 billion annually.

Shared cars for everyone

Self-driving cars may end up cementing the dream of private car ownership, but they could also give a boost to car-sharing among those who don’t own cars — a hybrid of car-rental programs such as Zipcar and automated roving taxis. That would allow even people who don’t own cars to join in on the newly improvedwork commute of the 21st century.

Such car-sharing could make more efficient use of cars that would otherwise sit idly in parking lots during the day. The cars could also come directly to a person’s home for pickup, as opposed to requiring people to walk to the nearest car-share parking lot.

“You don’t need so many cars parked and taking up space when they could be driving off on their own to be reused,” Stone said.

source: http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com