214 Just ordinAry robots
Spirit of Berlin, which participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge
in 2007. e car, a modied Volkswagen Passat, the result of the
AutoNOMOS car project, was subsidized by the German govern-
ment and implemented by the Articial Intelligence Group of the
Free University of Berlin.* e car has six stationary and one rotating
laser scanner, seven radar sensors, four video cameras, and an infrared
camera in order to get the fullest view of the environment. e devel-
opers have been awarded a license to carry out car tests on the roads in
the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. e next goal of the developers
is to drive the car across Europe.
A breakthrough in the AutoNOMOS project is that the car now
drives smoothly, giving the impression that a person is driving the car,
and the initial problem of sensitivity loss that robots typically have,
which results in a jerky ride, has been remedied.
e most notable development is that you can order the car with
your smartphone. e developers thus demonstrate a clear vision of
the future. e idea is that cars should vanish from the road when
they are not driving. In the developers’ view, future cars should
remain in central parking lots until an order call is made. As soon as
the call is received, the car, a driverless taxi, sets o for the customer’s
location and then picks up the customer and takes him/her to a des-
tination specied by the customer by smartphone. During the trip,
customers can read, work, eat, talk on the phone, watch a lm, or
send e-mails. e car’s system may be able to decide whether it picks
up other customers it encounters with a matching destination on the
planned route. ere is no need to park—the vehicle zooms o to pick
up another customer (see also Burns, 2013).
According to the researchers, in a city like Berlin, given the tie-in
with existing public transportation, driverless taxi mobility can meet
the personal mobility needs of the population with a eet whose size is
approximately 10% of the total number of passenger vehicles currently
in operation in Berlin. is corresponds with the results of Burns etal.
(2013). In a Singapore simulation, Spieser etal. (2014) found that a eet of
250,000 robotaxis could replace all modes of personal transportation and
fulll the transportation needs (including private and public cars, taxis,
scooters, buses and trains, etc.) of the entire populationofSingapore.
*
http://autonomos.inf.fu-berlin.de/.