ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 9, 1996 TAG: 9607100006
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JONATHAN MARSHALL SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
AUTOMATED HIGHWAY SYSTEMS may prevent many of the 40,000 fatalities that now occur each year.
Twenty years from now, falling asleep at the wheel may be a pleasant diversion rather than a quick route to the grave.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and other research centers are trying to take the thrills and danger out of driving by turning control of your car over to computers in the vehicle or along the road.
Automated highway systems promise to double or triple the capacity of today's congested roads, cut trip times and prevent many of the 40,000 fatalities that now occur each year.
In August 1997, Caltrans will oversee tests of human-driven cars with sensors that keep them in their lanes and a safe distance from other vehicles. It also will test a system where drivers put their cars on auto-pilot. They will be ``driven'' on a carpool lane on I-15 near San Diego by transmitters from a control center.
``Automatic vehicle control can assist the driver or eliminate him,'' said William Stevens, technical director of the National Automated Highway System Consortium, funded by the federal government and industry. ``The average human takes half a second or more to react. Sensors can react in milliseconds.''
The consortium members include General Motors, Hughes Aircraft, Bechtel, Caltrans, the University of California and Lockheed Martin.
Basic collision avoidance systems for vehicles may be ready for commercial rollout in just a few years, Stevens predicted. Radar or vision-based sensors in the front of your car will keep it a safe stopping distance from the car ahead. Other sensors will correct steering to keep your car within its lane. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates such technology could cut crashes by 17 percent.
In a fully automated system on dedicated lanes or highways, which might become feasible in 20 years, cars would be controlled by a traffic center and run very close together at high speeds.
Without people weaving in and out of lanes, slowing down or speeding up, automated highways could become much safer and more efficient than today - though drivers will need a lot of psychological adjustment to hand over steering to a computer.
Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed platoons of cars that move in tandem only 10 feet apart at 65 miles per hour. Stevens admitted he was apprehensive at first about riding in one. ``But then you realize it's not scary - it's like riding in a train,'' he said. ``The vehicle in front stays a constant distance away.''
In a speech last week to the world congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control in San Francisco, Stevens said the stakes are high. The federal government estimates that road congestion costs the nation $100 billion a year in lost productivity and that road accidents - 90 percent of which are caused by human error - cause more than 1.7 million disabling injuries a year.
With total vehicle miles traveled expected to double by the year 2020, Congress in 1991 asked the Department of Transportation to undertake a high-tech program to reduce congestion and accidents, with funding of more than $800 million over five years.
Besides car-control technology, other systems under development include on-board navigation systems to help drivers find the best route, automatic road signs to divert traffic away from congested areas and electronic tolling.
Europe and Japan are hard at work on similar technology. At last week's IFAC conference, Jurgen Ackermann, director of the Institute of Robotics and System Dynamics near Munich, won a medal for lifetime contributions to control technology, including a novel system for preventing cars from swerving due to icy roads or strong side-winds.
Using a cheap gyroscope and an electronic mechanism for front steering control derived from space robotics research, Ackermann said the system allowed drivers of a specially equipped BMW sedan to stay on course when hitting a slippery patch of a test track, where even professionals without the system lost control.
Ackermann said he has talked with BMW and parts makers such as Bosch about the technology, but has no commitments.
Critics see potential drawbacks to some proposed applications of advanced car technology. Roland Hwang, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Berkeley, said any program that encourages more use of single-occupancy vehicles is counterproductive. ``You'll just get more pollution and more urban sprawl,'' he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB