Sentience Intelligent Cruise Control Makes Your Car More Of A Robot Than It Is Already
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 12 of March , 2009 at 9:55 pm
As part of a talk on robotics that robotics expert David Calkins gave at ETech this week, he commented (as he has before) that the definition of robot is completely a matter of perspective. Many technologies that we don’t really think of as robotic would seem absolutely so to someone from the recent past. To someone who was used to washing clothes and dishes by hand, wouldn’t washing machines and a dishwashers be robots? And cars, with technologies like cruise control, definitely would be considered as such.
A research partnership from the UK has recently demonstrated a system called Sentience, which takes cruise control beyond the adaptive type that you can already get in some cars and takes it to the next level… A level that might get you to call your car a robot. Sentience lives on your cell phone and connects to your car’s ECU (the computer that controls the engine). You put in your route, and Sentience analyzes it for traffic, gradients, curves, speed limits, junctions, crossings, speed bumps, and traffic lights. It then takes over your adaptive cruise system and controls acceleration, speed, and deceleration the entire way. All you have to do is steer. It even wires itself into traffic light systems to predict when a light is about to turn red, and preemptively decelerates. Besides giving you the option of being more or less entirely asleep the whole way, Sentience is able to get between 5 and 24 percent better fuel efficiency, depending on traffic.
So, when will these robot cars start mowing down little kids at crosswalks? Look for it in new cars sometime around 2012.
[ Press Release ] VIA [ Gizmag ]
Comments (1)
Category: Artificial Intelligence
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Comment by rearviewed
Made Saturday, 28 of March , 2009 at 2:45 am
Yeah. I heard that these systems use a radar or laser setup which makes the vehicle to slow when approaching another vehicle.