Man’s needs are endless, and this has brought him from inventing the wheel, to animal driven carts; from steam powered cars to internal combustion engines; and from electric cars to software powered controls. Man has come a long way in improvising with his land transport needs.
The world's largest software company, Microsoft, is on its way to be the largest supplier of software to car manufacturers, with a custom version of Windows CE controlling everything from in-vehicle entertainment to satellite navigation.
General Motors says software and electronics already are responsible for more than one-third of the cost of a typical automobile, the figure closing in to upto 90 percent in five years. A lot of suitors are lining up with entertainment systems and such, hoping to turn tomorrow's cars into GPS-tracked living rooms on wheels.
Since 1998, Microsoft the company has been selling Windows-based navigation systems that show overhead maps on LCD screens in the dashboard. Also, computerization in in-car entertainment, which is still dominated by CDs, is gaining market. Vehicles powered with artificial-intelligence software and sporting the ability to "see" the road with external sensors supposedly, will be a staple in the U.S. military within 10 years.
The autonomous vehicle could be heavily armored and could take GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates of the road and create a map of obstacles and pass that data back to the semi-autonomous truck. All this could assist war-operations greatly and keep soldiers out of the line of fire.
Carmakers are headed toward total drive-by-wire systems; that means they take the physical actions of the driver,
and turn them into digital messages for the car's central control system. Sensors measure how far the driver turns the steering wheel, for example, and translate that to a message to turn the wheels the appropriate amount.
"Lane keeping" is another benefit of radar and laser sensors. The technology maintains a path down the center of the road and alerts the driver when the car begins to drift into another lane. The feature has been used in the trucking industry, and lately for cars too!
Machine-learning technology has already touched industries like drug discovery, e-mail processing and financial forecasting. But technology is still a long way from allowing an autonomous machine to handle every unpredicted situation that pops up. The robot must be able to learn from a situation and think it's way through the problem. But there are other problems they have to solve, like dealing with contingencies. What if a computer dies?
Well, everything comes with benefits and drawbacks. You would never know when a virus gets into the computer, causing the car to run over people!!!
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