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Autonomous Race Cars
Octothorp writes: "Though not as complicated as the underwater
vehicles. There is an annual competition sponsored by National Semiconductors to build an autonomous race car. They move along pretty well too, at almost 9 ft/s. More technical information on how they are built is available on a Berkeley page, and there's a video of the winning run for 2002."
Linking to a video file from the frontpage of /.?
Wowzers! Methinks flaming shards of this server will be moving - autonomously - at 9 ft/sec very shortly...
[/bad joke]
The streets are jam-packed with thousands of vehicles travelling in irregular serpentine patterns.
None of these machines (except mine, of course) contain any type of human intelligence, but it's interesting to watch the AI at work. At night the roads look like Conway's Game of Life running on a computer with bad RAM.
Expert systems allow some vehicles to negotiate left turns from right lanes and to outbrake school busses when entering a rotary.
Fuzzy logic is essential for speed control, stop lights, parking and many other mission-critical tasks.
Genetic algorithms tend to select the maneuvers which are least expected by other vehicles.
Task scheduling is done according to driver convenience. For example, turn signals are always lower priority than dialing a call on the mobile phone.
Most communications between vehicles is a crude form of "digital" communication.
Unfortunately, most of the vehicles are Windows-based which results in a high rate of crashes. Mack trucks seem to be better than average.
When the autopilot program failed, it could give a new meaning to the word "crash" ... no, wait a second, that's the original meaning of "crash" ... wierd... :) Where's the meta-irony nazi when you need them. Oh, wait... I need the meta-meta ... err, uh oh... I think we need Godel now...
... why, that's almost sixteen and a half kilofurlongs per fortnight!
yes, we have no bananas