A ROBOT car is a vehicle equipped with an autopilot system that is capable of driving from one point to another without guidance by a human operator. This is intended to produce several direct advantages:
* Increasing roadway capacity by reducing the distances between carsand better managing traffic flow
* Relieving vehicle occupants from driving and naviga
Indirect advantages are anticipated as well. Adoption of driverless cars could reduce the number of vehicles worldwide and eliminate the need for driver's licenses, rules of the road, traffic lights, traffic signs, highway patrols and vehicle insurances
Some proposed systems depe (i.e. systems embedded in or net are still in their infancy as of 2011, and there are no vehicles in existence that are approved for use in environments where they would encounter normal human drivers - though much progress was made in the late 2000s. Driverless passenger car programs include the 800 million Euro EC EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles, the 2getthere passenger vehicles from the Netherlands, the ARGO research project from Italy, the DARPA Grand Challenge from the USA, and Google driverless car.
 |
| Robot car |
History.
An early representation of the driverless car was Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1 World's Fair, which depicted electric cars powered by circuits embedded in the roadway and controlled by radio
In the 1980s a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robot van, designed by Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr Univ in Munich, Germany, achieved 100 km/h on streets without traffic. Subsequently,
Also in the 1980s the DARPA-funded Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) in the United States achieved the first road-following demonstration that used laser radar (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan), computer vision (Carnegie Mellon University and SRI), and autonomous robotic control (Carnegie Mellon and Martin Marietta) to control a driverless vehicle up to 30 km/h. In 1987, HRL Laboratories (formerly Hughes Research Labs) demonstrated the first off-road map and sensor-based autonomous navigation on the ALV. The vehicle travelled over 600m at 3 km/h on complex terrain with steep slopes, ravines, large rocks, and vegetation.
In 1994, the twin robot vehicles VaMP and Vita-2 of Daimler-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns of UniBwM drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h, albeit semi-autonomously with human interventions. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.
In 1995, Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1600 km trip from Munich in Bavaria tpeeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interveomous driving. Again it drove in traffic, executing manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 168 km.
 |
| Robot car |
In 1995, the Carnegie Mellon University Navlab project achieved 98.2% autonomous driving on a 5000 km (3000-mile) "No hands across America" trip. This car, however, was semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to control the steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were human-controlled.[citation needed]
in 1996 Alberto Broggi of the University of Parma launched the ARGO Project, which worked on enabling a modified Lancia Thema to follow the normal (painted) lane marks in an unmodified highway.[9] The culmination of the project wa00 km over six days on the motorways of northern Italy dubbed MilleMiglia in Automatico, with an average speed of 90 km/h. 94% of the time the car was in fully automatic mode, with the longest autpic vision algorithms to understand its environment, as opposed to the "laser, radar - whatever you need" approach taken by other efforts in the field.[citation needed.Three US Government funded military efforts known as Demo I (US Army), Demo II (DARPA), and Demo III (US Army), are cmo III (2001) demonstrated the ability of unmanned ground vehicles to navigate miles of difficult off-road terras rocks and trees. James Albus at NIST provided the Real-Time Control System which is a hierarchical control system. Not only were individual vehicles controlled (e.ing, and brake), but groups of vehicles had their movements automatically coordinated in response to high level goals.
In 2010 VisLab raIntercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a 13,000 km test run of autonomous vehicles. Four driverless electric vans successfully ended the drive from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on 28 October, 2010.
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
AHS) are an effort to construct special lanes on existing highways that would be equipped with magnets or other infrastructure to allow vehicles to stay in the center of the lane, while communicating with other vehicles (and with a central system) to avoid collision and manage traffic. Like the dual-mode monorail, the idea is that cars remain private and independent, and just use the AHS system as a quick way to move along designated routes. AHS allows specially equipped cars to join the system using special '
lanes' and to leave through 'anes'. When leaving the system each car verifies that its driver is ready to take control of the vehicle, and if that is not the case, the system parks the car safely in a predesignated area.
Some implementations use radar to avoid collisions and coordinate speed.
One example that uses this implementation is the AHS demo of 1997 near
, sponsored by the US government, in coordination with thelitical and feasibility concerns.
As of 2007, a three-year project is underway to allow robot controlled vehicles, including buses and trucks, to use a special lane alongon is to allow the vehicles to travel at shorter following distances and thereby allow more vehicles to use the lanes. The vehicles will still have drivers since they need to enter and exit the special lanes. The system is being designed by based in San Diego county
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car concept |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
 |
| Robot car |
