They can already park themsleves between pyramids of wine glasses, so it's easy to nod and sing along when the cars tell us they'll be driving without drivers within 23 years. The first will be tested this year, however, in a competition funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It seems an odd timeframe to shoot for, given that scientists can't predict next week, much less two decades in the future, but it turns out that it's not the hypothetical cars' reaction time or artificial intelligence that's the problem, but its sensory perception. So says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University:
The 2030 date is his, but the prelude will start much sooner: the same technology used in the battlefield by the military.
Also take a look at Prof. Schmidhuber's history of robot cars.
