So You Have a Driver's License, but Does Your Car?
Farewell, days when driving meant a texting hiatus and an inappropriate time to put both hands in the air when dancing to your favorite tunes. If you’ve ever wished your car could just, you know, drive itself, you may soon be in luck. The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (PAVE) group is, by their estimation, less than a month away from creating the first car to get its own driver’s license.PAVE was born in 2004 when several students in Alain Kornhauser’s transportation class watched the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge and became convinced, after watching each of the vehicles fail by the 7.5 mile mark on a 150-mile course, that they could construct a competitive autonomous vehicle.The group entered their vehicle, Prospect 11, in the 2005 DARPA competition, placing 10th out of 23 vehicle finalists. But they didn’t stop there. After acquiring a vehicle donation from Ford, PAVE began work on the Prospect 12 for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, and then continued work on this vehicle, placing third out of 47 teams and winning the title of “rookie of the year” in the 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition.If this is starting to sound eerily similar to those sci-fi artificial intelligence movies that have been giving you nightmares for the past decade or so, read on. Because not only can the car, you know, drive by itself, but it also has an obstacle-detection system good enough—or so PAVE hopes—to get it a passing grade on its road test. (Full disclosure: I, a human, did not pass my road test the first time. And not to be bitter, but I’d like to see this car parallel park). The car makes use of stereo cameras and software scans to locate regions of constant depth and note them as potential obstacles. These areas are then stored by tracking software as objects relative to the car’s current position, and estimates of the car’s motion are used to estimate locations of current and previous obstacles.So get ready to hop into the passenger’s seat and enjoy the ride. And make sure to bring your cell phone, your iPod, and lots of snacks in intricately-wrapped packages. I mean, it’s not like you have to keep your eyes on the road.