Nissan Teaches Cute Little RoboCars To School Like Fish
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 5 of October , 2009 at 12:24 am
You ever notice how fish never, ever find themselves stuck in traffic jams? It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You’re stuck on the highway behind some yahoo in a 1994 Volvo 940 turbo wagon driving 3 miles an hour, and over there are a bunch of fish just crusin’ along at full speed. You might think it’s because fish can take advantage of a highway that’s about 1.347 billion cubic kilometers in volume, but you’d be wrong… It’s because they know how to school.
Nissan (according to their website, they make computers) is exploring how fish avoid traffic jams so successfully with a group of adoooorable little robots that interact with each other based on a few simple rules:
Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep fish from running into each other while avoiding obstacles. And of course, it’s not just a traffic issue, it’s a safety issue also. Each of the Nissan robots is in constant communication with all the rest to make sure that nobody runs into anybody else, which would be a pretty useful thing to have in your car. Getting the system to work depends on some laser rangefinders and short range ultra wideband communications, but that kind of stuff isn’t too terribly far off when it comes to consumer automobiles… The newest cars have front collision sensors, rear collision sensors, lane drift sensors, as well as Bluetooth. So hypothetically, with a few hacks, you could set up a pack of those new Priuses that I just saw an ad on TV for to do everything these robots do. That would be pretty cool, certainly, but I’m still not gonna trade in my Volvo for one.
[ Nissan Press Release ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]
Leave a comment
Category: General
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg
No comments yet.