Robot car technology heads for the road

By Peter Henderson

VICTORVILLE, Calif. (Reuters) - Robotic cars were a technological success at a race of driverless vehicles this weekend. Now the technology heads for real road.

Cars with Volkswagen AG and General Motors Corp decals were the first to finish the final on Saturday of the U.S. Defense Department's Urban Challenge, a six-hour, 60-mile (100-km) course for driverless cars using only onboard computers and equipment to plot paths and steer themselves.

The winner was to be announced later on Sunday after timings were weighed against the safety of the driving to produce a final result.

Robot-steered cars sprouting racks of laser sensors and warning sirens drove through an abandoned military base neighborhood like super-careful student drivers, coming to a complete halt before each stop sign and scrupulously trying to follow California traffic rules but moving with the jerks and occasional ventures out of lanes of someone new to the job.

The U.S. military sponsored the race, the third in a series over four years, as part of its effort to replace soldiers with robots driving supply vehicles.

A 12-foot (3.7-metre) tall green truck named TerraMax from Oshkosh Truck Corp was developed exactly for that purpose and lumbered through a series of complex maneuvers before going off track.

But even Oshkosh sees the new technology helping in civilian life, such as searching intersections for cars headed towards the firetrucks it builds. In interviews, most entrants focused on stopping fatalities from traffic accidents. There are some 40,000 yearly in the United States alone.

HELP FOR HUMAN DRIVERS

"What is going to change the world is interpreting sensor data and making intelligent and safe decisions," said Jesse Levinson, a PhD student from Stanford University working on his team's artificial intelligence systems.

Levinson and others described the technology focus in the three races since 2004 by the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects agency, known as DARPA, as moving from hardware to artificial intelligence.

Products nearest completion are based on work in earlier races, such as Gray Matter Inc's driver in a box -- a computer that will drive a car without making complex decisions.

Aiming to make inroads into the auto test market, the handful of New Orleans engineers see demand for a plug-and-play driver that can cover the same route in the same way over and over again. So far they have not sold any, though.

Advanced technology is slowly creeping into cars, handling tasks such as parking. VW's production Passat already has a cruise control feature that can follow the car in front of it.

"We may not be far from technology assisting drivers," said Gerry Mayer, director of defense contractor Lockheed Martin's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "We're probably a long way away from full automatic."