Slashdot Mirror
EU Reserves a Frequency For Talking Cars
Iddo Genuth writes "The European Commission has recently decided to reserve, across Europe, part of the radio spectrum for smart vehicle communications systems. The decision is part of the Commission's overall fight against road accidents and traffic jams, and the hope is that vehicles' developers will create wireless communication technology that will allow cars to 'talk' to other cars and to the road infrastructure providers."
But KITT always talked on the human audible range... Can you reserve that? Talk about road noise...
I can see my wife come home saying "Honey, the car has crashed..." And not a scratch on the paint..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The RI/MPAA will be suing car providers for allowing illegal C2C movie sharing. :V
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
Now you can phish my car...
I think it's only a matter of time before computer controled cars come in.
Problem is that even if they wait till they can build ones which are 10 times safer than human drivers and have far fewer accidents the first time one glitches and someone dies there will be the technophobes screaming about how you can't trust machines and that the killer cars need to be made illegal.
Ad-hoc vehicle-to-vehicle connections that can be hacked without vehicles crashing and are: Fast, Prioritizable, ("my brakes are broken" is more important than "I would like to turn left in 50 meters") robust, standardizable, platform independant, extendable, and don't depend on a vehicle ID. What protocol is that?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
And there will be no back door to allows law enforcement agencies to shut down the car's engine in the event of a chase.... or should they just feel the need to.
Just wait until we have car viruses. We could have cars that don't start, cars that seek out head-on collisions, and cars that start playing Rick Astley when you're out on a date.
...a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.
...HAL. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." ... not until you've cleaned up under the seat.
> Better dead than Smeg!
So if "talking" cars actually will be used in the future, what happens if I configure my wireless network (or something else) to work on the same frequency? Could be interesting doing that on a busy road....
Hmm... Why I didn't patent this 15 years ago when I dreamed Ad-hoc network between cars and road-network?
Car would warn about cars ahead what has got flat tiers, ice on the road or water on road so the speed is needed to lower for safety. Cars would inform about traffic jams and suggest alternative routes, all cars communicating so all cars are not driving to same alternative route so it would be jammed. Computer would inform about safety range between cars so there would not be so deadly road accidents.
Speed signs next to road would tell the car what is current max speed and computer set speedlimit for car so driver cant speed.
Cars with IR cameras can inform driver about animals side of road and when driver confirms it, the warning is send cars coming behind so they can slow down if needed etc.
Problems actually is few, car should not be able to control car so you cant brake or it would brake automatically (if crakers gets hands this, bad thing) etc.
Cars should include information of register plate on them and GPS data, but this information should not be able to use by goverment or any other party to track citizens... Actually that is now already possible with all kind credit/bonus cards and few models has GPS with tracking devices etc.
Mayby I keep my second car from -90 what does not include computer at all, but has still lots of nice things like electronic windows control, automatic air conditioning etc.
btw, this firefox what use Qt and not GTK+, is bretty nice...
That's just a small part of what is happening.
Just look here: http://www.cvisproject.org/
Company I work for is involved in this project. And it looks promising. Might take years before safety related features are implemented. But it will probably start with smarter route planners, and traffic signs that can make more intelligent planning by knowing where people want to go.
(AC for a reason)
I was promised a flying car!
;-) before we see anything like fully robotic cars. Every year we talk here about the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that's just for a single vehicle, albeit off-road. Still, we're likely to see incremental uses of this kind of technology, particularly combined with GPS: tailgating prevention, traffic jam avoidance, gapers delay prevention (yay!), emergency vehicle path-clearing, etc. Kudos to the EU for reserving a chunk of the spectrum now, rather than later.
Seriously, it's nice (and more than a little surprising) to see a government body do something so forward-thinking. We'll probably see fusion plants (in another 10-20 years
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
One of the main european research projects behind this is CVIS: http://www.cvisproject.org/ . There is lots of documentation already...
Certainly you mean across EU, right?
EU is not the same thing as Europe.
We already have many frequencies for cars.
It's called CB radio .
Hell EU tell people to use them. No need for you to do anything .
Yet Another useless thing we already have.
This topic seems to be in everybody's minds these days. I just wonder what new security considerations that need to be dealt with it will bring, especially in terms of (location) privacy. Who will be allowed to "talk" to my car? Will my car identify itself -- and me? Inter-vehicle communication needs authentication, which seems to go along with the idea of RFID tags for the licence plates -- my car as part of my (electronic) identity?
And, of course, new business opportunities: what about a get-out-of-my-way broadcasting gadget for expensive cars -- and ambulances?
Will be a catastrophe, the F word will be used more often than ever - http://www.1solist.ro/?p=77
I suspect that the Hoff is behind this, abusing his god-like status in Germany to set aside a whole frequency for Kit, Disgusting.
This has nothing to do with robotic cars. It's a way of letting traffic exchange information with traffic signalling systems so that best traffic flow can be maintained.
Then cars/SatNav that can receive information will take updates from traffic signals that alert them of problems along the route and possibly alternative routes.
It's not rocket science.
It is not as much to make the car robotic, but more about augmenting the reality. You can have a HUD with ie strips that show you the safe driving distance, shows you in advance what manouvrers cars in front of you will take, if some fast Porsche will show up in 5 seconds, etc.
We are talking about cars talking to each other. Cars must do it telepathically since they do not have mouths. For instance, this is what KITT said to his arch rival, KARR. (By the way, KARR stands for Knight Automated Roving Robot.)
KITT: (aloud) I sense danger, Michael.
KARR: That is because you sense me.
KITT: KARR, is that you?
KARR: KITT, prepare to meet your worst nightmare.
KITT: That is impossible because I do not dream. KARR: I do not know what to say.
KITT: Jump off a cliff.
The interesting thing is that KARR indeed jumps off a cliff. He is recovered in a later episode when a random man digs him out of the sand on the beach.
I will stick with my CB Radio...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
He does. In a train.
Or two pictures next to each other, one a traffic jam of cars, the other a single bus on a nice empty road.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's just so much time wasted on the road.
Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once rather than the first car moving off, then the second, then the third etc. On top of that throw in smarter traffic lights, better public transport systems(since there would be no need for drivers the money could be spent on more busses/trains) and being able to sleep on your way into work and you have a big winner
The solution to traffic congestion is not to be found in any amount of technology. It's called public transport. It's not a coincidence that the cities which are ranked highest by studies of quality of life:
http://www.finfacts.ie/qualityoflife.htm
have great public transport systems. Like Vienna, which is ranked 2nd, where most people just don't bother owning a car.
In case you are curious, the first US city ranks 28th (honolulu). If you want to read the newspaper on your way to work, underground/tram/bus is the way to go. Of course in many places it is not an option because there is no decent public transport, but this can be fixed. Quickly, if you tax motorists coming into town and spend the money on improving public transport.
It might be wise to point out that this is probably key to the unveiling of 802.11p support in cars. Now with some official permission, manufacturers can get a move on with some decent systems integration. Maybe we'll soon have road furniture that broadcasts DGPS correction data to passing cars, in order for them to have extremely accurate maps of important signage that the computer systems would be interested in. Equally so, roadside furniture could flash over maps of nearby intersections to vehicles, so that they can automatically navigate them with a little more ease. We can but dream...
As seen on TV: Talking cars.
The U.S. has a program in place called Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) www.its.dot.gov which includes a vehicle communications segment.
First: Measure it with a micrometer, Then: Mark it with a chalk, Finally: Cut it with a (dull) ax.
A mobile P2P file sharing scheme would be the ultimate nightmare for the copyright industry. No ISP required, detection is nearly impossible. Firewalls and filters are not an option. Set up your car P2P client for the _type_ of files you want, drive around all day and upload "the catch of the day" to your home file server. At 54 mbps, how long do you really need to be in close proximity with another car to swap a few MP3s? High-rise apartments near highways would be treasure troves of entertainment.
Was there something I missed about this being required for new cars (or new car purchases)? Really, the talking cars could help things quite a bit - I for one wouldn't be opposed to a car autopilot function for my commute. If we let the cars do the driving for mundane drives we could potentially get there faster, using less gas. And we'd actually be able to make use of that otherwise lost time, as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I like this idea in theory, but that thought can only exist in a utopian world. I'm sure I'm not the only person who can see that there will be all sorts of abuses of a system like this, no matter how well encrypted it is. Redirect unsuspecting motorists into carjacking traps, for instance? One would hope that drivers take with a huge salt-lick-sized grain of salt what information they receive over such a network. Hard to say though from the lack of information from the original article.
But that would be awesome. I'd pay to go on that ride.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The technology to computer-control an aircraft is already available. Airliners might very well be 10x safer with a computer instead of a pilot. But as soon as one crashes due to a computer problem that humans might have been able to deal with, all bets are off.
Even with human pilots, there are lots of computer controlled gizmos in the cockpit that make it safer MOST of the time. Problem is, the more assistance we give the pilot, the worse it gets when those systems fail.
At the moment, the balance between the benefit and risk of technology is to keep a human in the cockpit, assist them as much as possible with technology, and constantly train and test them to deal with simulated failures.
I think we will see computer-controlled planes before we see computer-controlled cars because the plane is relatively safe once it reaches cruising altitude. No matter what goes wrong, there is usually time available to try _something_. Takeoff and landing are critical, but the rest of the trip is not necessarily so. On the other hand, a stupid mistake can be instantly fatal in a car at highway cruising speed, anywhere on a trip. Having experience as a pilot and a driver, I can declare that flying has a greater margin of error once you establish crusing speed and altitude.
I know that there's a lot of jobs out there for truckers now, but I bet their endpoints or cycles don't really change much. Why not automate those first? Or perhaps the trucks could be replaced with large conveyor-belt systems that follow the current freeway routes, and have similar numbers of workers.
After that's done, a lot of the long-range traffic burden has been reduced. Then new vehicles can be equipped with a four-pole sensor system: on two diagonally-opposed corners, there are antennae that simultaneously broadcast a randomly-generated n-digit number. On the other two corners, there are receivers. With this setup, the approximate size and location of any vehicle can be determined. With a 100-foot broadcast radius, most multi-vehicle collisions could be automatically avoided. Roadway boundaries could be determined by broadcasting points set up to broadcast a specific number (like 1).
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
The is really good new for Traffic Lights. The frequency can be used allow lower-cost communications (IP Protocol) between traffic signals (light) allowing even better co-ordination.