The car slammed to a halt on a sunny afternoon. A cloth and metal figure of a child wiggled back and forth following its sudden emergence into the car’s path. Inside, two sets of human eyes stared at the puppet kid’s eyes. The car was watching too.
A moment later, the car’s brake pedal lifted from the floor. The Bosch engineer riding in the car, who hadn’t even moved his foot as the vehicle brought itself to the abrupt stop, now stepped on the brake. Now that the car’s autonomous braking system—a chip that used images from a windshield camera—had concluded that the danger of an accident had passed, it was handing control back to the human driver. Continue reading How Self-Driving Cars Will Sneak Onto Our Roads→
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) will soon propose rules for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications on U.S. roads, it announced yesterday. The agency is now finalizing a report on a 2012 trial with almost 3000 cars in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and will follow that report with draft rules that would “require V2V devices in new vehicles in a future year.”
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Copenhagen, the city that popularized bike sharing in the 1990s, is replacing its coin-operated clunkers with electric motor–assisted bicycles with their own touch-screen instrument panels. The bikes, which the city beta-tested this past September and October, house motors that can provide up to 450 watts of power from a battery pack that’s rechargeable at dozens of docking stations around the city. But all that power may be too much of a good thing.
Beta testers last month “got very good at keeping [their] momentum to where the engine does most of the work,” reports Niklas Marschall, CEO of Cykel DK, the program’s operator. That was the first lesson Cykel DK learned: Riders will go to great lengths to avoid exerting themselves. Continue reading Copenhagen Pioneers Smart Electric-Bike Sharing→
Like an impatient teenager, self-driving car technology will be ready to hit the road well before authorities are ready to license it, predict a pair of studies released last week. That may not be such a bad thing, write researchers at RAND, a think tank in Santa Monica, Calif. Waiting until the technology’s potential and impacts are more clear could help policymakers establish better rules for driverless roads, they write.
Read the rest of this blog post in IEEE Spectrum’s Tech Talk blog: [html] [pdf]
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
