Driverless Car

Reported December 2007

BERLIN (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- You've seen cars with rear-view cameras, even cars that can parallel park themselves … but imagine seeing a car completely drive itself!

Started by a remote control -- this is a totally autonomous car.

“The Spirit of Berlin is a car that senses the environment … and then actually moves around without a driver,” Raul Rojas, Ph.D., Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Freie University in Berlin, Germany said.

Dr. Rojas created this car and says there are three main differences between it and the one you drive. “The important things are the antennas. They are for the navigation system.” Dr. Rojas said.

Laser scanners track everything around the car ten times per second. “They send out many pulses of light and they see the obstacles with the reflection of the light,” Dr. Rojas said.

Video cameras detect the street. A computer sends commands to the brakes, gas pedal, and steering wheel. “The sensors are already much better than what humans can do because they can sense obstacles in the front, in the back, to the left, to the right of the car … with very high resolution.” Dr. Rojas said.

You can see the Spirit of Berlin in action on this test track. The sensors pick up one million points per second. But Dr. Rojas says the biggest problem -- unlike people, computers can’t reason.

“We try to predict what pedestrians are going to do, and that’s very difficult for a computer,” Dr. Rojas said

But so far, this car is accident free!

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Dr. Paul Rojas
Rice University Department of Statistics
Houston, Texas
(713) 348-6132
rojas@inf.fu-berlin.de

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