Left: Look, Ma, no hands! The interior of the Mercedes S 500 Intelligent Drive autonomous car, which has been test-driven on 100 kilometres of city and highway. Above: Cruising the highway on autopilot
though in this time frame driverless cars for the masses will not be as fully autonomous as the trucks that Rio Tinto operates at its Pilbara mines in Australia. There, a fleet of trucks operates 24/7, year round. Monster trucks that can carry 290 tonnes of ore and overburden are controlled 24 hours a day by a supervi- sory control computer located at a remote operations centre more than 1,300 km away in Perth. Closer to home, Suncor is researching fully autonomous dump trucks for use in Alberta’s oilsands. But fully autonomous consumer cars will likely be very expensive at first and will probably require that numerous legal issues be addressed. Google now has a fleet of autonomous Prius vehicles as well
as a Lexus version that keep accumulating miles. At this point, their drivers still have to intervene every several hours or so. Each time the human driver feels the need to take over, Google’s team records that information and analyzes why the driver became uncomfortable. The team then programs in additional aspects of autonomy to deal with that situation the next time it happens. The tech giant plans to release a fully autonomous car between 2017 and 2020 for short hops in urban centres. “Google released a video this year where the car had automatically detected all the traffic cones around a construction site, identi- fied new lanes on the fly and drove as if nothing out of the ordi- nary had happened,” says professor Steven Waslander, director
of the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory (WAVELab). WAVELab is working on projects focused on collaborative
driving where robotic cars communicate important informa- tion about their current driving conditions — intended travel speeds and routes — and join into platoons on highways, posi- tioning themselves in close proximity to eliminate traffic con- gestion. Waslander and his colleagues are also working to expand the set of situations where we can drive autonomously — for example, moving beyond lane detection so vehicles can automatically handle multiple lanes, intersections and off- ramps. This past winter they looked at the effect of snow on road conditions and lane detection in order to facilitate autono- mous driving in adverse weather conditions.
How self-driving cars work An array of cameras, laser scanners, sonar and radar collect data all around the vehicle at least 30 times a second. Inertial mea- surement — which refers to a set of about nine sensors that includes gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetometers that measure the rate of rotation, acceleration and the direction of the magnetic field — computes the vehicle’s orientation and the rate of change of that orientation. All those cameras and sensors are connected to a computer that fuses the data to create a 3D computer map of the area around the vehicle.
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