i found this article complety by mistake …. this article is about the future of robots……..
AT FIRST SIGHT, IT LOOKED LIKE a typical suburban road accident. A Land Rover approached a Chevy Tahoe estate car that had stopped at a kerb; the Land Rover pulled out and tried to pass the Tahoe just as it started off again. There was a crack of fenders and the sound of paintwork being scraped, the kind of minor mishap that occurs on roads thousands of times every day.
Normally drivers get out, gesticulate, exchange insurance details and then drive off. But not on this occasion. No one got out of the cars for the simple reason that they had no humans inside them: the Tahoe and Land Rover were being controlled by computers competing in last November’s DARPA (the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge. To take part, teams had to enter robot cars that could navigate through city streets and cope with numerous road hazards created for the competition in the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, United States.
The idea that machines could perform to such standards is startling. Driving is a complex task that takes humans a long time to perfect. Yet here were a bunch of jumped-up laptops controlling cars like veteran chauffeurs.
Even more striking was the fact that the collision between the robot Land Rover, built by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Tahoe, fitted out by Cornell University AI experts, was the only scrape in the entire competition. Yet only three years earlier, at DARPA’s first driverless car race, every robot competitor – directed to navigate across a stretch of open desert – either crashed or seized up before getting near the finishing line. At the following year’s race, six robot cars completed the course.
