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.

GM's Cadillac division has reported they plan to release a "super cruise" feature in models mid-decade.

Today Google released a new 3 minute video highlighting advanced self-driving car use. Here I embed the video, discussion below includes some minor spoilers on surprises in the video. I'm pleased to see this released as I had a minor & peripheral role in the planning of it, but the team has done a great job on this project.

This video includes active operation of the vehicle on not just ordinary streets, by private parking lots for door to door transportation. You can click on it to see it in HD directly on Youtube.

You may not know the name of Continental, but they are a major supplier of components to the big automakers. A story in the Detroit Free Press details their latest project in autonomous driving. This is a VW Passat using radar Automatic-Cruise-Control combined with lane-keeping, similar to projects announced by Mercedes and VW/Audi itself. The story has a video showing the screen of the car displaying its lane-keeping.

A recent article on bicycles and pedestrians in the robocar world appears at the Greater Washington web site, which has taken an interest in robocar topics. In particular they are concerned about the vision of a reservation-based intersection, which does not use traffic signals. These designs from U of Texas got a lot of press in the last few weeks after a presentation at AAAS, but they've been around for years and I have a number of links to them.

The state of Nevada today approved regulations for self-driving cars in the state. Last year, Nevada passed a law outlining the path to these regulations, and their DMV has been working in consultation with Google, car makers and other parties to write them down. Today they were approved, allowing testing, certification and -- someday -- operation of vehicles in the state. Other laws are in consideration in other states inspired by the Nevada move.

A new group has sprung up in the valley around the concept of the open source automobile. I will be speaking at their meetup, which was going to be at Hacker Dojo and has moved to Intel's auditorium. Looks like a good crowd is signed up. Sorry, no deep Google secrets but there will be a video featuring the car and many visions of the future.

Robocars at Silicon Valley Open Source Automotive

This group is about all aspects of computerization in cars.

I'm back from a trip to the Netherlands and Ontario, and there's more to come on that, but the press awakening about robocars continues to grow:

This week, Wired has expanded it's "Let the Robot Drive" series with more articles:

Update: When I first wrote this, I was under the mistaken belief that Better Place only swapped one type of battery module. At present they only support one, but their swap stations are designed to support up to six kinds, as long as they can be loaded and unloaded from below.

BMW has spoken in the past of their Highly Automated Driving project. A new video about ConnectedDrive Connect goes into more details. While BMW insists this is just a research project and won't be in their cars for a long time, they also are expected to soon produce a traffic jam autopilot to compete with the offerings from Mercedes and Audi.

I've talked before about Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. It's an interesting journey into the world of traffic psychology and engineering, and has one chapter on robocars. That chapter was based on seeing Junior at Stanford, and things have come a long way since then.