A post by Dr Deeph Chana, Deputy Director for the Institute for Security Science and Technology. This blog first appeared as an opinion piece on GATEway project website, 19 September 2017.
The opportunities that driverless vehicles present are undoubtedly profound. None more so than the emergence of multi-modal transport services (trains, planes, automobiles … and boats) that will intelligently cooperate to take us from A to B without any human intervention.
Replacing the old biological controllers — namely us — the autonomous vehicle will excel in everything from energy efficiency to just being safe. The technology of today already affords us a near-term vision of the car where route planning and optimisation, refuelling and recharging, transactions with services (tolls , shops , parking lots), and authentication and hand-shaking for the purpose of site access control are all automatically achieved by the vehicle, without the human ‘in-the-loop’.