Tech trends:

Robotic cars: The chauffeur you've always wanted

by Rebekah Bovenmyer

Imagine pushing a button on your keychain and seeing your car come rolling to you—without a driver. You hop in and tell it to take you to school. The car drives while you space off, finish up some last-minute homework, or watch TV.

Before you know it, the car's stopped right in front of your school. You get out, tell the car to go park, and walk to class. At the end of the day, you call your car to you again to take you home. Now that's a sweet ride!

Closer than you think

Chris Urmson, director of technology for the Tartan autonomous racing team, says that the technology could be ready for fully robotic vehicles within 10 years.

"The plan is that you wouldn't have to drive your car in the future," says Urmson. "You still could if you loved to drive, but you wouldn't have to."

He should know. Urmson is the director of technology for Carnegie Mellon University's robotic racing team. On November 3, 2007, they won $2 million when their robotic GM Chevy Tahoe named Boss won the 6 hour, 60 mile race for autonomous vehicles.

These vehicles weren't just going in circles either. They were stopping at stop signs, parking, making left turns in traffic, and avoiding crashes with other autonomous and manually driven vehicles.

Here's how: The Carnegie Mellon team outfitted Boss with global positioning systems (GPS), lasers, and radar.

For each part of the race, the team uploaded a list of places where Boss was supposed to go for that part of the race, called a mission (the Department of Defense hosted the event). Then Boss set off on the course using lasers and radar to figure out where it was compared to where it wanted to be and what other vehicles were doing around it.

As impressive as all that is, are we ready to let a computer do the driving? Urmson says we'll need a warming up period.

"Pieces of this technology are already starting to flow into everyday life like GM's StabiliTrak (a varying braking system) and parking assistance for parallel parking that we're already seeing," says Urmson. "It's starting to flow together."