Comment Articles

Humans look to robot race

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 10 Jun 2003 11:16 BST

One thing that cars do remarkably well is kill people. Each year in the UK around three and a half thousand road users and pedestrians are killed -- and a hundred times as many injured. While there has been a steady stream of innovations designed to reduce the chances of a collision hurting a vehicle's occupants -- seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones -- there's been little movement on the much smarter business of stopping collisions happening at all. Even where pure legislation can effect changes, as in acceptable alcohol and speed limits, nothing much changes from one decade to the next. The most important recent safety innovation has been the hyperbright LED brakelight, which turns on instantly and adds a few hundred milliseconds extra braking time for the car behind. Worth having, but hardly sufficient.

Wasn't the future supposed to be different? Automatic road systems were promised, with robotically steered cars forming up into tight convoys and screaming across the countryside. Radar-guided collision avoidance systems would take care of safety far better than us fallible humans, while central routing would avoid congestion and billions of pounds' worth of wasted fuel and time. Fantastic.

If only it had happened that way. We're left with a few ancient TV reports from Volkswagen's test track, and cars that bleep quietly when you're about to back into a lamp-post. Driving a vehicle needs a great deal of intelligence or, in the case of motorcycle couriers, the unshakeable belief that you are on a mission from God and protected by all His great angels from harm. As modern computers have yet to evince real smarts or a theological bent, it's still us all-too-mortals behind the wheel. The commercial imperative to do enough research to fix this is missing.

There is another way. The early days of aviation were marked by similar research longeurs, as the uncertain finances of the fledgling industry left basic research and development undone. Various individuals, seeing this as an abdication of patriotic duty -- patriotism being more important than economics back then, with some splendid wars to prove it -- decided to force the issue by running and paying for flying competitions. Others then stumped up the cash to enter, with companies and nations vying for records. The Spitfire, that icon of British fortitude, came about like this in an amazing story involving fascist showgirls, but that's a story for another time.