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New in-car GPS tech uses motion sensors for accurate, autonomous city driving
In-car GPS developers have long had to wrestle with the urban canyon effect that blocks or bounces signals downtown: they often have to make best guesses for accuracy when they can't count on cellular or WiFi triangulation to pick up the slack, like a smartphone would. The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has nonetheless found a way to borrow a page from mobile devices to get that accuracy back. By supplementing the GPS data with accelerometers and gyroscopes, researchers can use direction changes and speed to fill in the blanks, improving accuracy from a crude-at-best 49 feet to between 3 and 7 feet. The University's creation doesn't just minimize the chance of a wrong turn; it could be key to intelligent or driverless cars that have to perform sudden maneuvers all on their own. While the enhanced system is just a prototype without a commercialization schedule, it already slots into just about any car, including the University's own intelligent car prototype (not pictured here). We may no longer have to lump car GPS units into the same "close is good enough" category as horseshoes and hand grenades. [Image credit: Steve Jurvetson, Flickr]
Intel Connected Cars will record your bad driving for posterity, take over if you're really screwing up
Intel's latest Research Day has sprung up a new vision for "smart" vehicles; a vision that frankly chills us to our very geeky core. Cameras and sensors attached to an Intel Connected Car will record data about your speed, steering and braking, and upon the event of an accident, forward those bits and bytes along to the police and your insurance company. Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it? Don't get us wrong, the tech foundation here is good -- having cars permanently hooked up to the ether can generally be considered a good thing -- but what's being envisioned is as obtrusive as it is irritating. Oh, didn't we mention that the cars can become self-aware and overrule you if you try to bend the rules of the road? Because they can.
