Driverless Cars

There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the advent of the self-driving automobile — road safety chief among them. But if nothing else, our future robot-chauffeur overlords are presumed to be more efficient drivers, less prone to speed up and brake based on emotion and the irrational urge to get to work two minutes faster, safety be damned. 

Probably not, says Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas. After a talk at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Bhat told KUT's Kate McGee that driverless cars will be great for people — without the need to drive, you can work or relax or even sleep during your morning commute. 

How Driverless Cars Work

The first step toward driverless cars came in the 1980s, and it's still with us today: anti-lock brakes(ABS, according to that terrifying light on the dashboard). With anti-lock brakes, the system does the pumping for you -- and it does it better and much faster than you ever could, thanks to speed sensors in the wheels.

 About ten years later, manufacturers used those same sensors to take the next step toward driverless cars: traction and stability control. These systems are a step up the sophistication ladder from ABS. 

They use the sensors at the wheels to detect when a car might go into an out-of-control skid or roll over, and then they use ABS and engine management to keep the car on the road and the shiny side up.

Several manufacturers offer automatic parking systems on everything from SUVs to compact cars and hybrids. The systems use sensors all around the car to guide it into a parallel parking space -- no human input required.  

The self-parking system is a big achievement in driverless car technology. With it, the car behaves like a driver might -- reading the area around it, reacting accordingly and going safely from point A to point B. 

Several manufacturers have driverless cars in the works, but since Google of all places has the jump on this project, they're also more forthcoming (sort of) about how their cars work. 

The Chauffeur system, as they call it, uses lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging and is not related to the liger, which is a lion and a tiger. Lidar works like radar and sonar, but it's far more accurate. 

It maps points in space using 64 rotating laser beams taking more than a million measurements per second to form a 3D model in its computer brain that's accurate to the centimeter.