It's been a while since I've done a major new article on long-term consequences of Robocars. For some time I've been puzzling over just how our urban spaces will change because of robocars. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and many things could go both ways. I have been calling for urban planners to start researching the consequences of robocars and modifying their own plans based on this.

(Of late I have been writing a few articles for some other online sites.

While there had been many rumous that Mercedes would introduce limited self-driving in the 2013 S-class, that was not to be, however, it seems plans for the 2014 S-class are much more firm. This car will feature "steering assist" which uses stereo cameras and radar to follow lanes and follow cars, along with standard ACC functions. Reportedly it will operate at very high speeds.

The robocar news continues to increase in pace.

Three big automaker announcements -- and not about V2V even though the ITS World Congress is going on this week.

Nissan is showing a modified Leaf able to do "valet" park in a controlled parking lot. The leaf downloads a map of the lot, and then, according to Nissan engineers, is able to determine its position in the lot with 4 cameras, then hunt for a spot and go into it. We've seen valet park demonstrations before, but calculating position entirely with cameras is somewhat new, mainly because of the issues with how lighting conditions vary. In an indoor parking garage it's a different story, and camera based localization under the constant lighting should be quite doable.

I haven't bothered quickly reporting on the robocar story every other media outlet covered, the signing by Jerry Brown of California's law to enable robocars. For those with the keenest interest, the video of the signing ceremony has a short talk by Sergey Brin on some of his visions for the car where he declares that the tech will be available for ordinary people within 5 years.

Tomorrow (Wed Sep 19) I will give a robocars talk at Dorkbot SF in San Francisco. Dorkbot is a regular gathering of "People doing strange things with electricity" and there will be two other sessions.

A round-up of just some of the recent robocar news:

I'm here in Newport beach at the Transportation Research Board's conference on self-driving vehicles. Today in a pre-session there was discussion of pre-robocar technologies and in particular applications of "managed lanes" and what the might mean for these technologies. Managed lanes are things like HOV/carpool lanes, HOT (carpool+toll), reversible lanes etc. Many people imagine these lanes would be used with pre-robocar technologies like convoys, super-cruise, cooperative ACC, Bus Rapid Transit etc.

An MIT team has been working on a car that is "hard to crash." Called the intelligent co-pilot it is not a self-driving car, but rather a collection of similar systems designed to detect if you are about to hit something and try to avoid it. To some extent, it actually wrests control from the driver.

A study is underway in Japan to build dedicated lanes for self-driving cars.

There have been experiments with dedicated lanes in the past, including a special automated lane back in the 90s in San Diego. The problem is much easier to solve (close to trivial by today's standards) if you have a dedicated lane, but this violates the first rule of robocars in my book -- don't change the infrastructure.

Hats off to the video embedded below, which was prepared for a futuristic transportation expo in my home town of Toronto.

Called the PAT (People and Things) this video outlines the UI and shows a period in the day of a robotic taxi/delivery vehicle as it moves around Toronto picking up people and packages.

An update on Robocar News:

One of my first rules of robocars is "you don't change the infrastructure." Changing infrastructure is very hard, very expensive, requires buy-in from all sorts of parties who are slow to make decisions, and even if you do change it, you then have a functionality that only works in the places you have managed to change it. New infrastructure takes many decades -- even centuries, to become truly ubiquitous.

I'm doing a former-cold-war tour this month and talking about robocars.

This Friday, May 11, I will be giving the 2301st lecture for the Philosophical Society of Washington with my new, Prezi-enabled robocars talk. This takes place around 8pm at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium. This lecture is free.

A week later it's off to Moscow to enjoy the wonders of Russia.

There will be a short talk locally in between at a private charity event on May 14.

I have not intended for this blog to become totally about robocars but the news continues to flow at a pace more rapid than most expected.

Over the years I have reported on the efforts of many teams attempting to build robocars all over the world.

I've collected a summary of all these teams, including both car companies, Google and academic efforts.

You can read about it at Summary of Robocar Teams.

If you know of additional efforts and teams, please let me know and I will update the list.

A round-up of interesting robocar news this week:

While Mercedes has been reported as promising a traffic-jam autopilot in the 2013 S class due later this year, I was surprised to learn that Honda briefly made claims that their 2006 "Accord ADAS" in the UK was a self-driving car.

This CBS video from January 2006 described the car as a self-driving car, and has a honda rep touting how game-changing it is.