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Stanford Working on Vehicle to Drive Through California Traffic |
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Written by William Cox
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Thursday, 16 February 2006 |
Hot off of their historic win at the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, Stanford's next goal is to create a robotic car that can drive on city streets. Their current goal is to have a vehicle drive from Los Angeles to San Franciso in October of 2007. Once again, VW will be sponsoring the team, this time with a smaller vehicle, like a Pasat Wagon. The team invisions robotic cars driving commuters to and from work freeing up hundreds of man hours a year.
"The average American worker spends an hour a day in the car, being non-productive. The amount of (productivity) money lost is estimated at $61 billion a year. This is a huge opportunity. It's going to be a multi-billion industry,"
Another benefit of such robotic cars is the added safety. If driving were 10% safer, upwards of 4,000 lives/year could be saved.
I, for one, will believe it when I see it. Sometimes I actually like driving and not having to worry about other things. Next thing you know, companies will be expecting their employees to be doing productive work during their commute instead of having some time alone - which is rare enough as it is.
Tags: [ Robots | DARPA | Stanley | Grand Challenge | Stanford]
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