YOU are driving along when your car suddenly screeches to a halt. As it stops, two children run out into the road, mere centimetres from your bumper, absorbed in a game of tag. You couldn鈥檛 possibly have seen them, but your car did. And it didn鈥檛 even use its own sensors.
This scenario is one of the goals of , a communication system for autonomous cars developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It lets vehicles 鈥渟ee鈥� out of the robotic eyes of other cars on the road.
A human driver approaching a blind corner must slow down and prepare for the unexpected, but an autonomous car connected to CarSpeak would be able to cruise through, provided with a continuous 3D view of the area created from information captured by other cars, or by a sensor fixed in place to help with the blind spot.
Advertisement
That continuous 3D view consists of a generated by on-board laser mapping equipment, and it involves a huge amount of data.
Sending all the information to every car on the road would quickly overwhelm any wireless network. 鈥淭here are hundreds of cars on the highway, and getting sensory data from all of them would be huge data congestion,鈥� says Dina Katabi, project leader for CarSpeak at MIT. 鈥淏ut most of them want to know about what鈥檚 going on at the next exit.鈥�
So, instead, CarSpeak allows cars to request a view of specific sections of the environment that they are unable to 鈥渟ee鈥� themselves, with other cars passing information back to the requesting car. The system works out which regions are facing the most demand and then assigns more bandwidth to those sections as needed, speeding the process up.
So far, the system has been tested on golf buggies in Singapore. Vehicles running CarSpeak navigated through their test environment more than twice as fast as vehicles using simple wireless to relay data, and were 14 times less likely to be involved in a collision with an unseen obstacle. The research was presented at the conference in Finland last month.
, a lead researcher on CarSpeak, says that the next step will be a larger-scale test with multiple full-sized cars.
Magnus Egerstedt at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta says it is an exciting idea but it still needs to be proven in real-world situations. 鈥淭o be completely honest, the sensors in my autonomous cars don鈥檛 have sufficient range to allow driving on the interstate. CarSpeak has the potential to make that footprint significantly larger.鈥�
