July 13, 2012 at 2:29 PM ET
The day when we leave the driving to robots may yet be in the distant future, but we could soon have robotic co-pilots to keep us safe on the road.
The technology works similar to an airplane’s auto-pilot, only in reverse. Instead of a human pilot taking the controls when a plane encounters danger, the intelligent co-pilot kicks in when a driver’s about to crash.
For example, a driver could crank the wheel to the right to avoid a pothole, but cranked so far that he's about to run off the road. The system will catch the unsafe trajectory and adjust the wheels accordingly.
"We make sure we honor the driver’s intentions as far as possible, but with the obvious caveat that we won’t allow a driver steering input that will cause a collision," Sterling Anderson, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is developing the system, told me today.
That honor system could help bridge the gap to the day when we trust autonomous technology enough to spend our commute time doing anything but actually driving.
In fact, Anderson said, the co-pilot technology he’s working on is "totally capable of autonomous driving."
"Autonomous driving is a much simpler problem than semi-autonomous for the simple reason that you don’t have to worry about a human, you don’t have to worry about obeying their intentions," he said.
The system uses cameras and a laser range finder to determine the car’s current state — such as its velocity and direction — and predict where it's going.
An algorithm uses all the information from the current and predicted state to make a danger assessment and "determine how much to intervene and when to intervene," Anderson explained.
He and his colleagues have run more than 1,200 trials of the system driving through a field lined with barrels and experienced only a few collisions that were blamed on hardware issues.
"We think with better hardware, the system should be fail-proof," Anderson said, adding the "legal disclaimer" that the system is not road-ready.
Using such a system, he added, could give drivers overconfidence in their skills — making them think they are better drivers than they really are.
To prevent that from happening, the team is working on feedback technology such as a torque in the wheel to "give them some indication of what you were just doing was actually not safe," he explained.
If we take those lessons in stride, how much longer until we just let the robots do the driving?