5/30/2023 0 Comments Detours cars![]() ![]() ![]() More specifically, they hoped that challenging driverless car researchers to compete against one another would spur innovation in a technology that could potentially have important military applications. In 2003 the United States military, under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), decided these cars were ready to race. Over the next couple of decades, however, universities and companies across the world took advantage of improvements in computer technology to create driverless cars that actually performed quite well in real-world road tests. That's when engineers from Japan's Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory successfully programmed a car outfitted with two cameras and an analog computer to follow white road markers at the blazing speed of 18.6 miles per hour (30 kilometers per hour), though a steel rail helped it along. Today's driverless cars, which navigate roads using sensors and computers to scan and interpret the environment, came out of the 1970s. Early attempts to actually develop this technology in the 1950s focused on so-called smart highways, which were roads embedded with steel cables that cars could detect and follow. The exhibit was a scale model of how the world might look in 1960, as envisioned by GM, and prominent on its tiny freeways were cars that drove themselves. But it wasn't until General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit premiered at the 1939 World's Fair that driverless cars really gained public attention. The idea for a driverless car can be traced all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched a pre-programmable cart in 1478 (seriously, what didn't that guy think of?). As an added bonus, driverless cars could ease congestion, reduce accidents, lower fuel consumption and even alleviate the demand for parking. If cars drove themselves, people who rely on others for transportation because of age or disability could have much more independence, not to mention your average commuter, who could have more time to relax. Sure, that's pretty awesome, but the real reason was more practical. Obviously, driverless cars weren't invented just so we could race them around a track. So how did driverless car racing get started? How is racing these cars down a track any different from driving them down the freeway? Will driverless car racing eventually put professional drivers out of a job? We'll run down these questions and more, but we're leaving the driving to you. And, because this is America, engineers have already tried racing their creations, albeit in individual time trials, not directly against one another. Perhaps most notably, Google's self-driving car project has logged more than 1.3 million miles of software-controlled driving from 2009 to December 2015. ![]() Engineers have made incredible progress in the design and testing of driverless cars since the first prototypes were rolled out in the 1970s. While this scenario hasn't yet played out in real life, it's only a matter of time until it does. ![]() Is the car remotely controlled? Did the driver jump out? Nope. As the first-place car slows to take its victory lap, it becomes apparent that no one is in the driver's seat. That's when you notice something strange. ![]()
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