Within a few years, you may be traveling in a car with nobody at the wheel. Whether you call it an autonomous, driverless, or self-driving vehicle, this automobile of the near-future needs a host of complex components, some now under development at Israeli companies and academic laboratories.
“You will be able to go to, let’s say, Paris or Tokyo, rent a car, swipe a card and tell it where you want it to go. You won’t have to know the area or the traffic rules,” says Prof. Zvi Shiller, founder of the department of mechanical engineering and mechatronics at Ariel University and director of its Paslin Laboratory for Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles (RAV Lab).
The biggest benefit will be fewer traffic accidents – which currently cause more than 30,000 casualties annually in the United States alone — by eliminating human error in driving. But that requires a very, very smart car.
In the RAV Lab, Shiller and his students are developing algorithms that will automatically modulate speed and handling in response to constantly changing, unpredictable road conditions. Driverless cars will need this capability to meet future safety regulations.
“Today’s driverless cars, introduced by leading car companies such as Ford, Volvo, and even Google, can drive very well on a road that is smooth and flat. Our research is about driving over a surface with bumps, ruts and hills,” Shiller tells ISRAEL21c.
“This is much more difficult because you can easily lose stability on that kind of terrain. If you’re driving too fast over a bump, you may jump into the air. You have to know at which speed you can drive safely without losing contact with the ground. You may need off-road driving capabilities less than 10 percent of the time, but you can’t trust a car that cannot handle those 10%.”
The current research continues Shiller’s work at the UCLA Laboratory for Robotics and Automation, which he founded and headed for 14 years before joining Ariel University in 2001.
An Israeli startup, Mobileye, which makes accident avoidance systems for automobiles, raised a record total of nearly $1 billion in its IPO last August.
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