Cars pictured on a busy street in Hanau, Germany. Autonomous cars can't yet navigate busy traffic completely alone. — dpa
Autonomous vehicles conjure visions of futuristic machines that lack steering wheels, but the first driverless cars probably won't actually be driverless.
Instead, manufacturers will likely start out with low levels of automation and gradually increase the technology.
Most of the self-driving car technologies under development now involve lower levels of automation, in which the car does not have complete control, said Mary Moore, strategic marketing director at automotive engineer association SAE International.
"There's still a driver, there's still a steering wheel in the car and at any point that driver can take over control of that car," she said.
Chicago-based Here Technologies, which creates high-definition maps for vehicles, recently displayed the autonomous functions its tech enables in a Ford Fusion.
The company's mapping technology creates a 3D construction of the world that tells a car what it needs to know about the road around it: reading directional information from the signs, examining the curves of lanes, scanning for upcoming exits and more.
Imagine it's snowing and the lines on the road are covered, said Sanjay Sood, head of highly automated driving at Here. As a driver, you read the signs and recognise the surroundings enough to know the rules of the road. Similarly, this mapping technology helps a driverless car understand enough about its surroundings to react.
"It's kind of like memory," Sood said. "It helps the vehicle position itself; understand where it is on the roadway."
This is a step in the direction of automation from the lane change assistance technology in most vehicles today. Those features typically use sensors or cameras to monitor the perimeter of the car – which self-driving vehicles likely will incorporate as well – but Here's mapping technology provides the maps for the vehicle to make those decisions.
Behind the wheel during a recent test drive was Matt Linder, an autonomous vehicle software developer at Minneapolis-based VSI Labs, which partnered with Here to enable the autonomous test drive. Linder drove the car onto the Kennedy Expressway at Fullerton Avenue and merged into traffic.
When Here's mapping technology switched on, Linder took his hands off the wheel, letting the technology do the work. As he rested his hands in his lap, the steering wheel moved just slightly in either direction, keeping the car in the lane. When it came to changing lanes, all Linder had to do was flip the turn signal and wait for the car to ease into the next lane.
All the time, Linder was accelerating and breaking as needed in the still-heavy 10am traffic.
Here works with automakers around the world, including Mercedes-Benz and BMW, to incorporate its technology into vehicles. Sood said he expects the mapping technology to roll out in higher-end vehicles first and become more common over time. He compared it to the spread of lower levels of automation, like cruise control.
"Cruise control, that took a while to become ubiquitous, but nowadays it's like a standard function," Sood said. "Anything that can help with safety or comfort, there's demand for that."
Features in today's vehicles, like parallel parking assistance or backup cameras, can be helpful in getting people accustomed to deeper levels of automation, said Brian Uzzi, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
"Eventually, the whole idea of driving a car that's driverless will become normalised," he said.
The technology still faces major roadblocks, such as infrastructure that can't support it or regulations that haven't caught up. But the allure of freeing up time in the car to do something other than stare at the road is strong, Uzzi said, and that could speed up adaptation.
"The aim is to have people feel like they're a passenger in a car that is being driven by another human being except it's not," Uzzi said. "Once we get there, our embrace of that technology will be complete." – Chicago Tribune/dpa
Win a prize this Mother's Day by subscribing to our annual plan now! T&C applies.
