If you’ve experienced Sheikh Zayed Road lately (we’re running a couple of pictures here to remind you), you won’t be surprised to learn that the most dangerous thing on the roads is the drivers – not the cars.

According to Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford University in California, speaking at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), this problem will soon be solved.

The scientists have now concluded that there are so many idiots behind the wheel it would be safer all round to have cars driven by robots.

Apparently technology is advancing so rapidly that by 2030 cars controlled by artificial intelligence will be a great improvement on those guided by humans.

There have already been fictional robotic vehicles such as Kitt, the star of the Knight Rider TV series, but Dr Thrun’s team came up with the real thing - Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg, with a mind of its own. Stanley has already bagged the $2 million prize for self-driving vehicles from the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The same team has just unveiled Junior, a VW Passat that will compete for next November’s DARPA challenge for cars that can steer themselves in an urban environment.
“Today, we are in a state where a car can drive 100 miles, plus or minus, before human assistance is necessary,” Dr Thrun explained. “By 2010 we expect this to go to about 1,000 miles, and by 2020 to a million miles before any kind of incident would occur.

“By 2030, roughly, we should be able to deploy this technology on highways.” This should make highway pile-ups a thing of the past.

Junior can make many more decisions than Stanley, as the robotic Passat handles traffic and tough manoeuvres. The competition will be on an airfield in California and the cars will be expected to cover sixty miles in six hours.

Stanley only had to be able to sense static objects and steer around them on the 130 mile desert course. The task facing Junior will be much tougher.

The car must be aware of all moving objects and complete journeys in a simulated cityscape where other cars are negotiated and traffic laws obeyed.

“In the last challenge, it didn’t really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush because either way you’d just drive around it,” Dr Thrun said. “The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment.”

Mike Montemerlo, another member of the Stanford team, said: “This has a component of prediction. There are other intelligent robot drivers out in the world. They are all making decisions. Predicting what they are going to do in the future is a hard problem that is important to driving. Is it my turn at the intersection? Do I have time to get across the intersection before somebody hits me?

“Controlling the entire vehicle, you have to be able to deal with an unpredictable environment — 99 per cent of driving is easy, but getting robots to do that last 1 per cent safely is the issue.”

Other robots on wheels

• In 1995 two US researchers drove 3,000 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego in a Pontiac minivan that steered itself for 98.2% of the way
• In 1997 Ernst Dickmanns won the Philip Morris Research Prize for his Mercedes S-Class which completed a 1,000mile test run from Munich to Denmark 95% automatically
• In 2005 tests of an S-Class Mercedes with a radar-based brake system ended in a three-car pile-up, televised by a German broadcaster. It was later reported that the accident had been faked
• Kitt, the fictional robotic vehicle of the TV series Knight Rider, had a human sidekick Michael Knight. The role was played by David Hasselhoff, who’s recent exploits in real life lead us to believe he still needs a robot to take care of him. Read why by clicking here.

Click here for footage of Russian drivers seriously in need of robotic control. Idiots like these are even giving the Emirates Road maniacs a run for their money!