Mechanical engineers and roboticists working at MIT have developed an intelligent automobile co-pilot that sits in the background and only interferes if you’re about to have an accident. If you fall asleep, for example, the co-pilot activates and keeps you on the road until you wake up again.

Like other autonomous and semi-autonomous solutions, the MIT co-pilot [research paper] uses an on-board camera and laser rangefinder to identify obstacles. These obstacles are then combined with various data points — such as the driver’s performance, and the car’s speed, stability, and physical characteristics — to create constraints. The co-pilot stays completely silent unless you come close to breaking one of these constraints — which might be as simple as a car in front braking quickly, or as complex as taking a corner too quickly. When this happens, a ton of robotics under the hood take over, only passing back control to the driver when the car is safe.

The video below does a fairly good job of explaining the system (though unfortunately it lacks an actual example of the co-pilot saving a driver from imminent death):



This intelligent co-pilot is starkly contrasted with Google’s self-driving cars, which are completely computer-controlled unless you lean forward, put your hands on the wheel, and take over. This is a lot like an airplane’s auto-pilot, where the human pilot only takes over if something goes wrong, or there are adverse conditions that the flight control system can’t handle. The problem with the “human backup” approach is that you’re asking someone who has been leaning back for X hours to suddenly take over the controls, which results in panicky behavior. It recently emerged that the Air France Flight 447 accident was caused by the autopilot disengaging, and then the human pilot making a silly mistake.

There is also the “deskilling” issue, where eventually no one knows how to drive a car (or fly a plane). This isn’t so bad if every car on the road is autonomous, and if steering wheels are removed altogether, but the in between period could be tricky. To this end, the MIT team admits that their co-pilot needs to be tweaked to deliver significant negative feedback so that drivers (especially learners!) don’t get too big for their britches.

In other news, Eric Schmidt — Google’s chairman — has gone on the record and said that “self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime.” At the same press conference, Schmidt also said that Google has talked to every automaker in the world about its self-driving cars, though they’re still “not ready for productization.”

It will be interesting to see how the autonomous vs. semi-autonomous battle pans out. As we’ve covered before, the semi-autonomous solutions that keep your car in-lane or slam the brakes on when a human walks into the road could be a huge boon to road safety. A completely autonomous road system with car-to-car communications would improve safety as well, and reduce fuel consumption and increase the total capacity of roads — but at the expense of losing our ability to drive.