Hello Folks,
Its been a while since anything has been posted on this blog so please forgive the long absence, but we are back with a slew of new articles ready to be published over the coming six months. There is a whole lot of ground to cover, as a lot of fresh research has emerged and lots of companies, groups, and universities are increasing their investments in time and resources into looking at the future of driverless technology.
We would like to start off by showing you this article recently published by Autoblog.com which covers the recent research of Stanford University into the behavior of race car drivers when they are driving their vehicles at the limit on a closed race track.
Apparantly, the researchers are trying to create a set of algorithms that will allow a vehicle to drive itself autonomously and behave as if it were trying to post the fastest possible lap times on a track.
We here at the driverless auto tech review are not quite sure whether they will succeed in their endeavors, but we do commend the research team for their motivations, since apparently the goal of all the research is to refine on board traction control systems so that they control the behavior of the vehicle better, allowing a driver to maximze the performance of his vehicle in a high speed condition. But that is the main reason we are perplexed.
We believe that, in normal driving conditions such as everyday highway commuting, and perhaps even normal street driving, the use of a set of systems to control the vehicle fully and or enhance the safety of the commute through active interventions during vehicle movement is an important enhancement of the overall activity of commuting. However, the employment of such systems to maximize the performance potential of a vehicle, either in a closed track context, or in an open road context, goes a long way towards negating two key ideas; The test of the skills of the driver, upon which the concept of racing in general is built, and the refinement of the driver/machine interaction interface (i.e. the responsiveness of the controls to the driver, the button placement, the position of the driver relative to the vehicle and to the ground, etc) to which interference of technology which would assist the driver, would no doubt detract from the progress of such a relationship.
There is not a shadow of a doubt that as our knowledge of the human brain and body increase and we are better able to monitor and understand such behaviors, we are going to learn more and more about ways we can apply that knowledge to autonomous technology, and there is also no doubt that, if we want to, we can acheive the same kind of, if not better performance through autonomy in the future, even in a racing context, but we will eventually come to a point, as a whole society, in which we will have to choose what to apply this tecnology to and what to leave to the perfect imperfection of humanity.
We cannot help but compare the progression of automotive trends to those of the horse and its reletionship to the horse drawn carriage. As technology for internal combustion engines became more and more feasible, so was the horse phased out as a primary source of motive power. Now, the care and racing of horses is focused primarily on the relationship between man and his steed, relegated to the context of a track, and considered pure sport which serves no purpous beyond itself, an art form, if you will.
We consider automotive racing in a similar fashion in relation to the driver, a nostalgic resort of visceral interaction between man and machine, pure in its unneccessary nature, to be studied and mimicked for its driver's display of skill, but not to be tampered with in terms of automation or intervention.
