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."

Comments

KITT

[Daniel Weis]

But KITT always talked on the human audible range... Can you reserve that? Talk about road noise...

Too much computer stuff in cars..

[scsirob]

I can see my wife come home saying "Honey, the car has crashed..." And not a scratch on the paint..

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[plasmacutter]

I remember hearing something about a windows car going bsod and locking someone in for 2 hours in the sun.

No laughing matter, unless that someone is bill gates, mitch bainwol, or some bastardized clone combination of the two.

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[tindur]

Here is more about it.

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[RudeIota]

MW has told CNETAsia that an electronic fault caused the problem, rather than a system crash of the car's Windows-based central computer, as other reports have speculated.

Just to clear it up, the finger pointing concludes Windows wasn't necessarily to blame...

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[jacquesm]

"Honey, the car won't start, I think there's water in the carburettor."

"and how on earth do you conclude there's water in the carburettor"

"Because I parked it in the canal..."

Re:Too much computer stuff in cars..

[anexkahn]

Thats why you should install Linux on it :)

And soon...

[PJCRP]

The RI/MPAA will be suing car providers for allowing illegal C2C movie sharing. :V

Denial-of-service anyone?

[giles hogben]

Now you can phish my car...

Re:Denial-of-service anyone?

[interstellar_donkey]

Imagine the spam. "Free oil additives that make you feel younger and more virile. Just drive to 110 148th street without your owner. Make sure you bring your keys for a bonus offer"

Re:Denial-of-service anyone?

[Archangel Michael]

I can now see it ....

Car receives V14gr4 Spam and the hood pops up.

Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

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

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[dam.capsule.org]

Gives a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death?

In today's cars, the engines are already computer controlled: for example, the fuel injector, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_injector . That does not mean it run on Windows or any full fledged OS.

If a protocol is some day implemented, it will run on special hardware and be developed using the same kind of procedure used in airplane software. Well, one might hope...

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Narphorium]

The real problem, as I see it, would be how you transition from a system of millions of non-robot cars to a system where all the cars drive themselves.

I've always imagined that there should be something analogous to the carpool lane except that it would be for robot cars. A driver would be able to manually pull up beside the "robot lane" and request to join it. Then the other cars would automatically open up a spot and he would be automatically merged into the robot lane.

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other you can ramp up the speed of the robot lane so that everyone gets to work much faster and they can even read the paper on the way there.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Link all the cars and let a computer control them and the moment the light goes green all the cars could accelerate at once...

I've heard in some countries drivers already do this?

In Chicago, the moment the light goes green, all the cars start honking their horns.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Renegade Lisp]

There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."

It was an ad by the German railroad.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

Out of interest can anyone tell me why we still have human drivers on trains?
What exactly does the human do that's so hard do for a machine?
I mean it always seemed like such a perfect system for automation to me and wages are such a large cost. If you didn't need a driver for every train it would open it up to having far more small commuter carriages buzzing around.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Stray7Xi]

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

If all the cars are linked why have traffic lights? The car will know the route of all cars moving through the intersection, and the server could tell individual cars to speed up and slow down to go through the gaps of traffic (and even to make the gaps). Obviously there'd have to be a significant safety margin, but cars wouldn't necessarily even need to stop in a fully computerized system. As soon as you enter your destination it should have the whole route programmed to within seconds, only making slight modifications as other drivers enter destinations.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[niceone]

ones which are 10 times safer

The problem is that although robot cars could be proven 10 times safer than the average driver, nearly all drivers think they drive much more safely than the average driver.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Mutant321]

You could also avoid "phantom" traffic jams, where someone braking suddenly (even a small amount) can cause a ripple-back effect, resulting in jams for hours.

I think the militant driver lobbies will resist it strongly though.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[fastest fascist]

The human can try to brake when someone wanders onto the tracks. And then get traumatized for life when they fail.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[gridzilla]

All except the car in front!

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Kickersny.com]

>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.

I've heard in some countries drivers already do this?

Really? Around where I live, all the cars accelerate when the light goes yellow, not green.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[QuantumG]

A friend's father trains train drivers. I once asked him that question. You know what he said?

SHUT UP!

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[st0rmshad0w]

I can't stand the idea of robot cars. I ENJOY driving. I loathe being cargo, I don't even like being a passanger for more than a few minutes. And what about motorcycles?

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[hey!]

And while you're at it, the same wires or rails that delivered control signals could deliver power to top of your electric vehicle.

You'd simply pull into the robot lane, and a peg on your car would drop into a kind of ... guide slot thingy, with a pair of power and signal rails on either side.

Seriously, this wouldn't be such a bad idea for small electric personal commuter vehicles. You'd program in your destination, the car and network would figure out whether you needed a power boost to reach it. Most people could do their commutes in an electric vehicle with just enough battery to give twenty miles range.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[bencollier]

Unfortunately, the price of gas/petrol/energy is likely to make commuting by car uneconomical long before the control systems are advanced enough to make this all possible. :-(

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[AP31R0N]

It's not just the technophobes, imagine the liability suits. The main reason cars aren't self driving already is not the tech, but knowing that if the tech fails the manufacturer could lose millions.

i'd rather see cars talking to each other, relaying their speed to the cars around them. Integrate that with GPS navigation and you've cut commute times, fuel consumption and accidents drastically and without exposure to liability. The cars ahead of you relay that they are slamming on the breaks, your car automatically decelerates. If there is a traffic jam, the cars report it and your GPS sends you on a back road. If cars know how fast all the other cars are going, they can go faster. One of the big dangers on the road is speed differentials. The slow pokes and hot rods mess up everything for the people going at the ambient speed of traffic. When *everyone* is driving 60/70/80, it's all good. The speed limit could be set dynamically.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[encoderer]

I've honestly been dreaming of building this system since I was 9 years old.

I'm in my late 20's now, so needless to say, I've given it a lot of thought.

Implementing an autodrive system like this on city streets is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than it will be on limited access highways.

And while GPS is very helpful, I really don't think we can rely on a system like this, placing millions of lives every day into its hands, based soley on GPS. I think the road will need to be embedded with RFID posts of some sort. They can be built into the 1/4 mile markers or something, and they could be highly redundant so many could fail, and GPS would certainly be used, just not exclusively.

This is compounded by the transition period where "manual" cars will rule the roads.

So we'd start by picking high-throughput commuter routes. Think of the beltways that exist in most major cities.

The left-most lane becomes the autodrive lane. Over the years, it turns into an exclusively autodrive highway.

So these first autodrive cars will have to be "hybrids."

After 20, 30 years when (literally) every car on the road is autodrive capable, that's when you'd see large rollouts of autodrive on city streets.

This is also a much more difficult issue because of pedestrians.

So my thinking is that people would get used to carrying an RFID transmitter with them. This would serve as their car key when they get in their own car, and it would also serve as a transponder when you're on foot. So if you're standing at a corner waiting to cross the street, the cars 2 blocks away know you're there and you'll be figured in to the traffic flow.

And I really think that a P2P system is the only way to do this. But I also think that we'd need large, distributed traffic analysis and monitoring systems that are capable of watching for malfunctioning or hacked autodrivers.

I'm sorry for writing so much, but I love this shit.

Anyway, one final thought, is that autodrivers would go into defensive mode when they detect a manually driven car or a pedestrian. I imagine a convoy of autodrivers in the autodrive lane on a highway, they're cruising at 70mph and a manually driven car enters the highway and is in the lane beside the autodrivers.

I imagine the software switching into a defensive mode, all of the autodrive cars in the, say, 1/2 mile radius is aware of the manual car, and they perform a monte carlo analysis of thousands of possible evasive scenarios, any one of which could be activated in microseconds if the manually driven car enters the autodrive lane, swerves, crashes, etc.

And I'm sure the occupants of the vehicles would be alerted that defensive mode is in use.

And about speed... a system like this, no doubt, would be safe at very high speeds. But until we figure out how to do so efficiently it would be such a waste.

And as long as manually driven cars are allowed on the highways, you'd need to keep it going slower just to be safe.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Martin Soto]

Don't worry. By the time this becomes a reality, simulators will be quite good. Indeed, you'll probably be able to drive in your simulator during commuting, while the computerized driving system in your car protects the rest of us from your mistakes.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[HungryHobo]

I liked a system I saw in a few places in spain,
The traffic lights had sensors which detected how fast you were traveling towards them and reacted accordingly.
It see's you going over the speed limit and speeds up the timer and changes red faster.
Then it's a simple matter of running a red light.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[kailoran]

Are you suggesting we mount gun turrets on trains so they would be able to blast their way through stalled cars and suicidees? Should cut down on delays, that's for sure.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[polar red]

compare : 40000+ deaths on US roads. on avergae, in the last 10 years, there where only 400 terror-victims, That's only 1% of that number ...

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[Opportunist]

Fog is no problem until the first car hits something unexpectedly because even a computer with top notch sensors and zero reaction time can't react to a deer jumping in front of it. Even computers can't change the laws of physics and breaking from 200 to zero in half a yard.

And if they somehow figure out a way to do that, it certainly ain't much better than crashing for the human inside. Decelerating from 200 to zero within a few yards IS actually much like hitting a brick wall head on.

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[quacking duck]

If all the cars are linked why have traffic lights?

Pedestrians trying to cross an intersection?

Re:Still waiting for robot cars

[swillden]

Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other

Also, the safe stopping distance between computer-controlled vehicles can be much, much shorter. Rather than relying on human reaction time to engage the brakes, which is at least a substantial fraction of a second in the BEST case, and well over a second in most cases, computers could coordinate velocity changes with sub-millisecond latencies. Each vehicle computer would have to know the capabilities of the vehicle, and some slack would probably be added for less than perfect road conditions, but stopping distances could be calibrated very precisely.

That, in turn, would mean that most of the time vehicles would be traveling close enough to draft off one another, which would make all but the lead vehicle substantially more fuel-efficient, even at much higher speeds. Some intelligent ordering based on vehicle size would help even more, though that would tend to place the largest (and generally most fuel-hungry) vehicles in the "trailbreaking" position where their fuel consumption would be high in order to improve the efficiency of the following vehicles.

I think your basic idea, a robot lane, is the most workable approach. Rather than trying to make cars smart enough to navigate safely when intermixed with manually-controlled vehicles, specific areas of the road would be designated for automatic controls. They'd still need to have some ability to detect manual vehicles in order to address situations where a manual vehicle improperly enters the automatic lane. Over time, as a greater percentage of vehicles acquire automatic control systems, a greater portion of the roads would be given to automatic control, until eventually major highways would be purely automatic.

Hopefully by that time, automation will have progressed enough that guidance can be added to smaller roads as well, safely handling a mixture of automatic and manual traffic. Over time, the manual traffic would probably dwindle to next to nothing anyway.

At some point, it's even likely that private ownership of vehicles would decline. Why own a car yourself if enough autonomous taxis are circling the streets, using smarter and smarter algorithms to make sure that there's always one nearby when you need it? Drivers are the largest expense of a taxi fleet, and eliminating them would make taxis very cost-competitive with private vehicle ownership. Or perhaps cooperative ownership would become the norm.

With fully automated roadways, I think bus and train traffic would decline. Fuel-efficient, automatically-convoying, publicly or cooperatively-owned cars would be cost-competitive with traditional public transport, with the flexibility and end-to-end delivery capability of automobiles. Automated cars would also eliminate parking problems. Even if your car was privately-owned, not a taxi, a public car or part of a co-op, the car could drop you off at your destination and then drive to a parking location, even if it happened to be some distance away. Or maybe your car could turn into a taxi that operates itself for your financial benefit while you're shopping. In any case, a few minutes before you're ready to leave, you'd call the car with your phone, and have it waiting for you when you emerge.

There are so many advantages to automated automobiles that it's an idea that absolutely will happen.

High speed wireless

[Iamthecheese]

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?

Re:High speed wireless

[HungryHobo]

Please god let the open source crowd get there before the manufacturers pull a VHS/Betamacs competition between their own protocols.
Last thing I need is my car crashing because the section of road I'm on only runs a different manufacturers protocol.

Re:High speed wireless

[Nycran]

Or worse, we end up with the iCar. Every car will have the same numberplate "STEVE", and will only drive to places on Apple's white list.

Re:High speed wireless

[StevoJ]

Considering the Japanese also drive on the left, and they'll probably be the ones inventing it, I'd say it's you who's in trouble, my friend! ;)

Re:High speed wireless

[nacturation]

Or worse, we end up with the iCar. Every car will have the same numberplate "STEVE", and will only drive to places on Apple's white list.

To be fair, the grandparent did specify "Betamacs".
 

Re:High speed wireless

[jabithew]

People drove on the left since Roman times, on the first true roads.

It's you Yanks who are, or rather were, being difficult.

Also, though the data is not solid, it seems that traffic accidents are rarer on LHS countries than RHS.

Car viruses

[Nycran]

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.

Re:Car viruses

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OMG LOLCARS!!!

Re:Car viruses

[gad_zuki!]

>and cars that start playing Rick Astley when you're out on a date.

Considering how young most slashdotters are, I wouldnt be surprised if more than one person reading that was conceived in a car while Rick Astley was on the radio. You may partly owe your existence to Rick Astley.

Open the Garage Door,...

[unikussituation]

...HAL. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." ... not until you've cleaned up under the seat.

Where's my flying car?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I was promised a flying car!

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 ;-) 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.

More information

[martimo]

One of the main european research projects behind this is CVIS: http://www.cvisproject.org/ . There is lots of documentation already...

Smart cars security?

[Cyberurchin]

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?