The Transportationist

DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for driverless cars, the third of which will be held in an urban environment in November 2007. These challenges are excellent ways to motivate research (read Longitude by Sobel on earlier challenges). This is getting some buzz as one of the contestants is being parked at the London Science Museum, (an excellent Science Museum by the way).

Let's hope this ends better than the Automated Highway System demonstration of 1997, which despite technical success resulted in cancellation of the program.

I believe Driverless cars will succeed where AHS did not, as this is a much better design path, as it does not require both new networks and new vehicles, only new vehicles which can operate (we hope without incident) in mixed traffic.