Carnegie Mellon University professor goes for a hands-free drive on DC’s roads.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Sixty years ago writers Philip Dick and Robert Heinlein envisioned automated cab systems, which is now a reality with driverless cars. Their futuristic outlook was remarkable given that prior to the 1920s, the cars on the road had to be cranked manually to get started.
Advertisements nowadays for luxury cars are all about superior technology for safety and comfort, and not just being fuel efficient: cars that brake automatically to avoid collision, swerves back into lanes when drivers stray, smart GPS systems that suggests alternate routes when traffic jams loom.
Technology advances like Cruise Control which came into being in the 1940s is taken for granted now on highways.
But what about the mind blowing concept of sitting in the back seat reading a book, or stretching out to take a nap as the car drives on its own, takes you to a destination safely? Well, it’s almost there.
Leave it to the likes of brilliant engineers like Raghunathan ‘Raj’ Rajkumar, the George Westinghouse Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who is close to achieving that, since he started to work on the project in 2008.
Rajkumar, who is also a member of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program Advisory Committee of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), is developing several initiatives on driverless cars, including being the co-director of the GM-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab; the Principal Investigator of a project on “Advanced Transportation Systems” funded by the National Science Foundation; and the director of the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation (T-SET) University Transportation Center (UTC), funded by the USDOT.
Rajkumar was featured prominently in the news a little over a year ago, for introducing a fully-autonomous vehicle – a Cadillac SRX, which was designed by engineers at the GM Collaborative Research Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Last September, Rep. Bill Shuster, a Republican from Altoona made a 33-mile trip from Cranberry Township to Pittsburgh International Airport in that car.
Now, Rajkumar is back in the news as The Washington Post has featured a story with a test drive of the car with modified features that went around the roads of crowded Washington, DC.
And except for a couple of chinks like the computer-driven car not being able to understand the commands of a traffic cop who rushed towards it – but was actually waving to another car, and at another spot where a service truck was stopped with yellow cone plopped behind it, which prompted the Cadillac to come to a stop behind it, and required human maneuvering to get past that, it did pretty well.
The car is fitted with tech gadgets to help it: two cameras — one pointing up at traffic signals, the other down at lane lines — are hidden beneath a slight ridge added just above the windshield, says the Post report. There is longer-range radar behind the Cadillac medallion on the front grille and shorter-range radar behind the front bumper. A pair of laser beams peer out from that bumper. Unseen behind tinted windows near the back seat, from unobtrusive boxes that match the Cadillac’s tan interior, a radar and a laser beam look out to each side. There are more radar and lasers at the rear bumper.
All of them feed into a bank of four computers hidden in the spare-tire well beneath the rear floor of the vehicle. The computers also get GPS data and mapping feeds, and calculates accurately speed limits and places where left turns are illegal and where right turns on red are okay. If one computer fails, the others take over its chores and the person behind the wheel gets an alert, says the Post report.
Rajkumar was quoted as saying that the car needs more work to be perfected, but these cars are soon going to be ubiquitous sight on roads.
“Absolutely no doubt at all. I welcome their scepticism”, he says of doubters. “Technology cannot be stopped. We just have to make sure that it is safe, affordable and legal.”
According to him, the next advance in assembly-line cars — within three to five years — will be a highway pilot feature. Put the car in the correct lane, tell it to go to San Francisco from DC, and it will, he told the Post. A year or two later, highway “plus-plus” will arrive, allowing that San Francisco-bound car to weave around the slowpokes along the way. In the same time frame — three to four years — look for traffic-jam assist capability. The car will take over while inching through bumper-to-bumper traffic and alert the driver to take back control once there’s clear sailing.
“The [totally] driverless version will happen in the 2020s,” Rajkumar said. “But the whole process will be incremental. More and more scenarios that we drive in will become automated, and one fine day you’ve given up complete control, but you don’t even notice.”
Google, which revealed their fleet of driverless Google cars in 2010, is trying to beat developers like Carnegie Mellon University led by Rajkumar, in the commercial race. They have at present eight self-driving cars, including six Toyota Prius hybrids, one Audi TT, and their latest addition, a Hybrid Lexus RX450h.
At present, Nevada and California allow autonomous cars on their roads; Florida allows tests of self-driving cars.
The amazing video of the Cadillac developed by Rajkumar moving around the streets of Washington will have many more states following suit soon to cater to trending technology.
With drones in the air that can soon be made to look like sleek vehicles and driverless cars on the roads below, it won’t be long before the world looks a lot like what science fiction films like Minority Report, and I Robot, portrayed.