Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) plans to invest $7.9 million in autonomous driving technologies in the next three years, thus joining automakers that want to see smart cars on freeways as soon as possible.
There is a touch of irony to Jaguar's announcement, because the company aims at a different approach than most carmakers. JLR believes that having a human pilot on the self-driving cars will help the vehicles "learn" a more natural, human way of behaving in traffic.
In other words, rather than having a human driver in the car just in case something goes wrong, JLR wants to focus on the human driver just as much as on the autonomous driving technology.
Multiple surveys indicate that drivers feel uneasy when they let the autonomous cars take all decisions. At the moment, self-driving tech acts rigorously in a robotic fashion, which means it follows every driving rule and law to the letter.
JLR argues that driving is comprised of complex scenarios, such as rapid shifts in weather conditions, managing intersections and roundabouts, or merging into heavy traffic. In these cases, the car might act opposite to your driving style, thus causing discomfort, fear, or both. The presence of a human pilot in self-driving cars would allow the software to take hints from the person on the steering wheel and adjust its driving strategy accordingly.
"To successfully introduce driverless cars, we actually need to focus on the driver, as well as pedestrians and other road users," Director of Research and Technology at Jaguar Land Rover, Wolfgang Epple, said a while back.
The JLR vehicles recently joined the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK-CITE) project, which has a value of $7.9 million. The UK-CITE program keeps tabs on a total of 100 almost-autonomous vehicles that run on a 41-mile test corridor between Coventry and Solihull, England.
The automated vehicles will sometimes mingle with the real traffic conditions, so if your commute takes you between Solihull and Coventry, you could tailgate one of them soon.
The ambitious national project means to use the freshly installed vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) systems on public roads. These will feed instant information about traffic and road conditions to the connected vehicles.
Before we see the streets flooded with self-driving vehicles, high-tech infrastructure is mandatory. Seeing how exterior sensors that already exist on vehicles can become useless in certain weather conditions, V2I and V2V sensors will help fill in those gaps.
Besides safety, the project aims to clear up the freeways and improve traffic levels.
To do so, the autonomous driving technologies will allow your car to "platoon" with other vehicles while on highways. This means that you will be part of a snake of cars that will travel at a higher speed, in perfect synchronicity. In order to have a functional capacity to do this, all cars should be equipped with the proper autonomous driving tech.
Two years ago, JLR featured its latest (at the time) Land Rover with a suite of intelligent technologies that helped the driver focus better on the road ahead. One element that caught our attention was that the car adapted its driving style to the driver. It did so by using records of past mileage from each different driver who stepped behind the wheel.
We look forward to seeing how JLR's self-driving technologies will use the intelligent technologies. Having an autonomous car that takes us safely from point A to point B is great, getting there in a driving style that is compatible with ourselves is plain awesome.
