A new car has been developed by Oxford University scientists which can ‘see’ its surroundings.
The Wildcat has a bank of sensors which can drive the car by interpreting laser, camera and radar data. It is hoped that traffic safety will be improved and congestion cut with the advances in technology.
The modified Wildcat is an autonomously driven vehicle and it’s sensors can exactly pinpoint the vehicles location, unlike traditional GPS systems which are only able to locate a broad idea of position rendering it unable to guide at speed with any accuracy. The new technology gives the advantage of being able to respond to the surroundings more safely.
Professor Paul Newman, the head of the project, believes motoring will be impacted enormously by on board computer capacity in the future. With cars that can park themselves already available and last years’ announcement by Google of their self-driving vehicle, technology is already moving in this direction.
The Wildcat is more heavily reliant on its on-board map which stores three dimensional street plans. The idea would be for highway authorities and local councils to maintain the map data which would then be updated for the relevant vehicles.
The long term aim is to have vehicles which do not rely on human intervention, smart cars able to travel from point A to point B with the added advantage that roads will be cleaner, safer and less congested, without the human elements of distraction and tiredness.
The project is a collaboration between the university, Nissan and BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council has awarded £1.4 million towards research.