We are still along way off from the computer controlled highways of the classic 2004 iRobot film. However, the first steps toward a not too dissimilar reality may not be that far away.

In 2012 Google had already crossed the half a million kilometres-distance-covered goal with their self-driven cars. Of particular importance was that this was achieved completely accident free. The feat was managed with roughly 12 cars on the road at any one time.

In 2014 the company revealed their first car prototype and as of early 2016 the fleet had completed more than 2.5 million kilometres.

The other major company to have invested strongly in this sector is Tesla Motors who also have developed software capable of driving a car. However, their roll-out was on a much larger scale. As of May 2016 the software had driven the equivalent of over 200 million kilometres.

Unfortunately, this mark was the point where the first fatality took place. For human driven cars, fatalities occur every 150 million kilometres or so but in autonomous cars every incident forms part of learning process for the software design team. That is, problems are identified and the design fault is remedied, saying that there has only been one such incident thus far and the fatalities rate is already less than that of human drivers.

Autonomous cars offer other interesting possibilities. They can be summoned by smart-phone meaning that parking problems may slowly be eased away. They also don’t have large steering wheels or pedal units so there’s much more space for everything else in the car.

On the technology side autonomous vehicles host a number of cutting edge devices ranging from extremely accurate GPS to radar, multiple cameras and motion sensing technology besides a host of others.

What’s the next step in for driverless cars? Besides bringing it to a point that they can be rolled out en masse to the public, the technology may also soon be ferrying people across cities and high density towns replacing the traditional taxi. In fact, a number of trials are set to be launched later this year in the US to test out this very idea. A trail is already in Singapore.

However, the US trial will only involve a small number of these cars and they will all have a human driver with hands on the steering wheel just in case the system fails at any point. The goal is to ramp this up to 100 cars and eventually to remove the human driver from the equation altogether.

This would drastically reduce the cost of taxies and open another possible avenue to solving the transportation problem of high density areas as well as tackling the causes of global warming since each car would be electric.

Did you know!

• The first functioning automobile was built in 1768 by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot and had a steam powered engine.

• As of 2014 there were 693 cars per 1,000 people in Malta whereas, in San Marino, there are 1,263 cars per 1,000 people.

• The world’s oldest sub-way system is in London and has been functioning since 1863.

• The very first speeding ticket was issued in 1904 in Dayton, Ohio, for going 12 miles per hour.

For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think

Sound bites

• Hybrid cars go electric 55 per cent of the time: Hybrid cars offer the possibility of using either electricity or fossil fuels (i.e. petrol for instance) to run the vehicle. This option rests on the driver and depends mainly on issues such as length of trip and how accessible power units are to the user. The Institute of Transport Economics in Norway recently conducted a very revealing survey involving 8,000 hybrid car users. Not unexpectedly, it was found that most of these drivers were young and owned, on average, more vehicles than other drivers. This last point mainly rests on the fact that the cost of these vehicles is still relatively high in comparison with other cars and so it is only accessible to high earners for now. However, it was also found that these drivers use the electric mode of their car roughly 55 per cent of the time. Fundamentally what was found was that Hybrid drivers only switched their electric mode off when they didn’t have enough power to continue on their journey. Malta’s situation is very different with shorter trips and more recharging stations. A similar survey may reveal other ways to better the hybrid and electric choice in Malta.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160816085033.htm

• Centimetre accurate GPS: A team of researchers at the University of Texas have developed a low-cost GPS-based positioning system that is accurate up to at least the centimetre scale, which may revolutionise the way we use the system. This would make mobile phone GPS much easier to use and transport related positioning much better while also opening the door on higher quality virtual reality headsets for instance. The system, called GRID, makes much better use of the GPS signal satellites already sent. GRID currently runs outside of a host mobile phone but is well on the way to being made to run within its processing unit making it something that may be running in every phone we use.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150505083031.htm

• To find out some more interesting science news, listen to Radio Mocha every Monday and Friday at 1pm on Radju Malta 2.

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