God Save the Queen, Self-driving cars invading the UK in six months

The British parliament has just announced that driverless cars will be legally allowed on public roads beginning January 2015. The proposal marks a two year delay given The Department for Transport’s pledge to let self-driving cars be trialed on public roads as far back as 2013.

Speaking at an automotive engineering firm belonging to the company Mira, British Business Secretary Vince Cable outlined the steps being taken to review road regulations and provide proper guidelines. “Today's announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society,” he said. 

Legal concerns have largely detained the autonomous vehicles to private roads, but a rising sense of competition with other nations – who have been quicker to provide public road access – has spurred the UK to follow suit. Google’s driverless cars have already covered 300,000 miles of public roads in the states of California, Nevada, and Florida, while Volvo has received permission to test 100 autonomous vehicles in the Swedish city of Gothenburg in 2017.

British civil servants have until the end of the year to finalize the amended traffic regulations and determine how laws should apply to vehicles without a driver or those whose driver can override autonomous controls at short notice. Who will be held accountable?

Unlike an airplane’s autopilot mode, ground vehicles do not have the luxury of space and must rely on a completely different set of technologies to achieve automation. These technologies are primarily composed of some sort of light detection, computer vision, and GPS. 

One of the chief innovators leading the ground work is Lidar, a light detection and ranging system that measures the angle of lasers bouncing off of reflective surface to simultaneously gather information about millions of small points surrounding the vehicle at every given second. Cameras attached to the vehicle on all sides provide a second layer of information that is interpreted by software responsible for making sense of the 360-degree images. And finally, the GPS location data obtained from satellites, radar, and ultrasonic sensors help the car detect objects in close proximity, measure the vehicle’s orientation, and ultimately, determine its exact location.

The best estimates dictate at least a decade is needed to work out all the kinks of the technology and win over the hearts of politicians worldwide. Just a month ago the FBI warned of the potential opportunities for terror afforded by driverless vehicles.

Via BBC