UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January

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Media captionThe BBC's Jon Ironmonger finds out how to 'drive' a driverless car








Other countries have, however, been swifter to provide access to public routes.

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Media captionBusiness Secretary Vince Cable 'felt safe' in driverless car




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Two area will be examined by the review: how the rules should apply to vehicles in which the driver can take back control at short notice, and how they should apply to vehicles in which there is no driver.

How do driverless cars work?

Image copyright Google
Image caption Google's self-drive car combines video and sensor data to determine where to steer

The label "driverless vehicle" actually covers a lot of different premises.

Indeed, the cruise control, automatic braking, anti-lane drift and self-parking functions already built into many vehicles offer a certain degree of autonomy.

But the term is generally used to refer to vehicles that take charge of steering, accelerating, indicating and braking during most if not all of a journey between two points, much in the same way aeroplanes can be set to autopilot.

Unlike the skies, however, the roads are much more crowded, and a range of technologies are being developed to tackle the problem.

One of the leading innovations is Lidar (light detection and ranging), a system that measures how lasers bounce off reflective surfaces to capture capture information about millions of small points surrounding the vehicle every second. The technology is already used to create the online maps used by Google and Nokia.

Another complimentary technique is "computer vision" - the use of software to make sense of 360-degree images captured by cameras attached to the vehicle, which can warn of pedestrians, cyclists, roadworks and other objects that might be in the vehicle's path.

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Image caption Part of the challenge for manufacturers will be how to hide the many sensors involved

Autonomous vehicles can also make use of global-positioning system (GPS) location data from satellites; radar; ultrasonic sensors to detect objects close to the car; and further sensors to accurately measure the vehicle's orientation and the rotation of its wheels, to help it understand its exact location.



International rivals

In May, Google unveiled plans to manufacture 100 self-driving vehicles.

The search-giant exhibited a prototype which has no steering wheel or pedals - just a stop-go button.

Google has also put its autonomous driving technology in cars built by other companies, including Toyota, Audi and Lexus.

Other major manufacturers, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and General Motors, are developing their own models.

Most recently, the Chinese search engine Baidu also declared an interest, saying its research labs were at an "early stage of development" on a driverless car project.

But concerns about the safety of driverless cars have been raised by politicians in the US and elsewhere.


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