Public Transportation in evolution---using advanced technology for safer roads
08.05.2008 (This is May 8, 2008 in Japan)

A car navigation system designed for the elderly, wireless car-to-car communication,
no more blind spots and more. ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) is a national
project to integrate people, roads and cars with a wireless network for a comfortable
and safe car-oriented society.  http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/logistics/report-109617.html

Guardian & Semi-Guardian

Fully developed guardian angel vehicles will have no traffic accidents. No pedestrians, no police, no road workers and no bicyclists, die because some fool drifts onto the road shoulder. No back injuries from inattentive rear-enders. No T-bone deaths at intersections. No inexperienced children dying with one quick bad decision.  No one plowing into buildings or crowds of people.

Initially, used or classic cars, pedestrians, and bicycles will be at least semi-guardian.  A car or a person can be semi-guardian with only the location and motion sensors to telegraph intentions, but without the automatic control of brakes, wheel, and accelerator.  A small (cell phone or even watch size) semi-guardian device would provide the semi-guardianangel car drivers with visual or aural warnings of a pedestrian, while also warning the pedestrian of the car.  Fully-guardian cars would avoid equipped pedestrians or bicyclists automatically.

Cell phones and car navigation systems are already accurate to within a few feet.  The Garmin Forerunner, www.garmin.com $300 in March 2006, is a watch that uses GPS navigation to calculate calories burned, distance, pace, elevation, and heart rate.  Nieman Marcus offers a dog collar that phones the owner, if the dog wanders out of a preset area.  Celestron, www.celestron.com, is selling the SkyScout handheld telescope.  The SkyScout uses GPS, accelerometers, magnetic sensors, and memory to guide your gaze to the celestial object of desire.  A grad student at UC Berkeley has developed an inertial navigation glove with bluetooth to track exercise, www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kenghao/.  The guardian device would use the same set of sensors to know its location within a few inches at freeway speeds.

The Technology of Guardian Angel Cars

Guardian is not the same as “robotic.”  The successful competitors in the DARPA Grand Challenge are examples of robotic vehicles.  They drive themselves, without human attention using many sensors to detect obstacles and approaching vehicles.  The need for many sensors makes robotic vehicles expensive, adding several thousand dollars to the cost of a car.

Study Bill Gates’ article, “A Robot in Every Home,” Scientific American, January 2007.  Mr. Gates’ perceptions of robotics suggest a 5-year, $billion effort would be a high payback investment to achieve accident-free, congestion-relieving vehicles.  The following two paragraphs are my effort to relate Mr. Gates’ article to transportation:

Automobiles wouldn’t need to be completely autonomous when “providing physical assistance … for the elderly” or to “help people with disabilities get around.”  They only need to “work in concert” with each other, buildings, bicyclists, and pedestrians.  We don’t need the more difficult autonomous vehicle for civilian use.  All we need is horse sense.  We provide the general guidance; the horse doesn’t run into the other horses or trees.  Horse sense might come in cell-phone sized decentralized software service devices with GPS, inertial navigation, a few sensors (sensors would be on both roads and cars), and radio.

As Red Whittaker told Mr. Gates, “the hardware capability is mostly there; now the issue is getting the software right.”  Mr. Gates describes Microsoft Robotics Studio, a product which allows everyone (high school and college students) to inexpensively and safely participate in the software side of a challenge.  Plus, Robotics Studio is an inexpensive way to solve concurrency and component failure issues without crashing the real challenge vehicles.  In summary, Mr. Gates points the way toward inexpensive redundant and robust systems that can improve incredibly on our current reliability.  Current reliability is about 50,000 vehicle miles per “accident.”  Our goal should be better than 500,000 vehicle miles per “accident.”

A week after Mr. Gates predictions in Scientific American appeared, Intel and IBM report a breakthrough in microchip technology (Isn't that a familiar phrase?) allowing the continuation of Moore's Law.  The concern was that the insulating layers of carbon dioxide were being shaved too thin, causing energy waste.  The new process gets around this concern.  Intel will be producing the new chips in 2007.

The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society has a great approach for an inexpensive and educational Challenge - small model cars.  Students could safely race 1/10th or smaller models.  See this article from March 26, 2007 InformationWeek, http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198700030.  IEEE could make their race much more practical with the addition of car-car and car-road communication.

Per the April 2007 Scientific American, page 96, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates stability control (drive-by-wire brakes, engine, and steering) adds $111 to car costs, and would save up to 10,300 lives per year (placing it between seat belts and air bags for life saving).  NHTSA wants stability control to be standard for the 2012 model year.  Names for such systems include Dynamic Stability Control (BMW), SbalitiTrak (General Motors), and Interactive Vehicle Dynamics (Ford).

Sick of Driving? This Robot Car Takes the Wheel

By John Brandon,Business 2.0 Magazine  February 2007

A 39 year-old Stanford professor thinks he's built the Model T of self-driving cars.
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- "Leave the driving to us" was a clever slogan for Greyhound buses - but Sebastian Thrun foresees a day when it'll work for the auto industry.

Thrun is confident thatStanley is the Model T of self-driving cars.  "There's an enormous waste of productivity in commuter traffic. We could increase the capacity of highways with precision driving."  There were 43,443U.S. highway fatalities in 2005, and Thrun thinks self-driving vehicles, equipped with cameras and motion sensors and all networked with one another, could reduce that number by 50 percent.

http://smallbusiness.aol.com/start/startup/article-partner/_a/sick-of-driving-this-robot-car-takes-the/20070221165409990002

Still nursing disappointment in the safety auction, the little girl walked home.  Then the little girl’s cell phone rang.  She stopped to sit on a bench while she answered.  It was her older brother.  He was in the Army (the best most high-tech army in the world).  He served by driving supply trucks in a war with no visible enemy.  The invisible enemy somehow managed to blow up a lot of trucks and their drivers.  He called because he wanted to hear her voice and he was excited about a new assignment.  He was going to manage trucks that drove themselves.  The new trucks didn’t crash into each other or drive over cliffs.  Most of all, he was happy that he and his friends would not be in the truck when it blew up.

(Little Girl continued on Gov't Action)

Bulging bumper could speed journey to computerised carriageways

19 Feb 2007

Investigations by engineers at TheUniversity ofManchester into an extendable car bumper could help speed along the arrival of computer-controlled motorways.

A paper presented at the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) World Congress and Exhibition recently offers a glimpse of how a high-tech, environmentally-friendly and efficient motorway network could operate safely in the future.

The vision is that vehicles would not be independently driven, but regulated and controlled via information beamed from transmitters at the side of the road. Cars would also communicate and co-operate with the vehicles around them to ensure a safe and fast journey for everyone.

With the use of UK motorway space estimated to be as little as five per cent, the grouping or 'platooning' of cars is seen as one way to increase capacity and reduce congestion. As computer-controlled vehicles would be able to travel much closer together, it would mean less fuel consumption due to a reduction in aerodynamic drag.  http://smallbusiness.aol.com/start/startup/article-partner/_a/sick-of-driving-this-robot-car-takes-the/20070221165409990002

Guardian's Weakness

While the cost efficiency of guardian technology and the ability to protect pedestrians is its strength, its coordinated approach is also its weakness.  As demand increases, robotic vehicles will evolve on their own.  Evolving guardian vehicles, however, requires a deliberate and coordinated effort by both government and private sectors.  Imitating the DARPA Grand Challenge with a CHALLENGE would provide that coordinated effort.

Guardian Angel Technology Is Old

General Motors has guardianangel technology figured out.  See the February 24, 2006 news article in Contra Costa Times  http://tinyurl.co.uk/a7un. General Motors believes its system, named V2V, could be on 2007 model cars adding as little as $200 to the cost of the car.

Some components of individually robot and guardianangel are available on 2006 cars.  This illustration is from a Wired Magazine, www.wired.com, article by Joshua Davis January 2006.  The article was about Stanley, robot winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Fully robotic vehicles are about to be on freeways, http://tinyurl.co.uk/7s2x.

Civilian use of the 2006 military global positioning system (GPS) alone, may not be adequate.  Although it is a semi-truth that GPS signals are accurate only to 15 feet.  Virtually all the errors are due to atmospheric or satellite conditions that cancel out for the relative location of two close GPS receivers. That is how accuracy to fractions of an inch is achieved using GPS receivers at reference locations providing corrections and relative positioning data for remote receivers.  Also, the European Space agency is launching Galileo, a next generation space-based navigation system.  It will provide free accuracy within 3 feet and subscription accuracy within a few inches, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4555276.stm.  (That implies free precision within inches.)  It will also guarantee service and offer aids such as calculating tolls by miles traveled, emergency beacons to find people crashed off the road, directions to nearest pizza joint, etc.