Overview

Who among us has not been driving down an empty stretch of highway and found ourselves wondering, Why can t my car be programmed to do this simple job? In fact, the concept has been around since General Motors presented a mock-up of an automated vehicle highway system at the 1939 World s Fair.

The eventual evolution of our road transportation system leads inevitably to fully automated vehicle operations for most situations. Surely, the driver in communion with a sporty roadster on a sunny Sunday afternoon will always be an option. However, for routine driving commuting, freight movement, passenger shuttles automated operations just make sense. Automated vehicles are more orderly and fully coordinated, labor costs are reduced for commercial operations, and convenience (and relief from drudgery) is at its peak. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 9, mobility increases dramatically to the extent that vehicles can automatically coordinate their movements, removing human lag times and perceptual limitations from the vehicle operation control loop.

However, this evolution relies on one major caveat the vehicle automation systems must be exceedingly robust and reliable. The public must have the same confidence in automated vehicles that they have now in elevators, for instance. The systems must be many times more robust than our personal computers. The vehicles must behave in ways that make sense to the occupants to earn their trust. Further, they must see a clear benefit in safety, mobility, or convenience to invest in such systems.

When these systems were first conceived, they were called Automated Highway Systems...