2020: Driverless cars on Dubai roads

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is currently mulling the use of smart autonomous vehicles in Dubai as part of its efforts to utilise sophisticated technologies in achieving smart mobility with the aim of applying the concept during Expo 2020," said Matter al Tayar, Chairman of the RTA.

With a date attached to the technology, driverless cars are becoming a reality sooner than many had expected.

Although Foresight UK predicted the year 2056 to be the launching date and the Free University of Berlin called for 2040, the year 2020 has been pinned down by Volvo, the US Department of Transportation and Dennis Bushnell of Nasa.

General Motors even predicted the year 2018 to be the year of the first autonomous vehicle on the road.

The RTA explains how the technology works in its Innovation Exhibition stalled at Noor Metro station during Innovation Week.

"Unlike a human driver with limited situational awareness, an autonomous car can continuously monitor a broad range of aspects, active and passively, with a 360 degrees field of view.

"It can thus more quickly determine a safe reaction to a potential hazard and initiate the reaction faster than a human driver."

In comparison, this means that where a human needs 2 seconds to react and press the brakes, a computer only needs 0.3 seconds for the same reaction.

At a speed of 10mph, a human would decelerate over 27 meters what a computer would do in 8 meters.

Increase the speed to 90 mphand the comparison is 584 metres for a human to 416 metres for a computer.

"Filled with robots and instant real-time information, driverless cars make safety a primary benefit," the explanation continues.

"Traditional radar sensors are used to detect dangerous objects on the vehicle's path from more than 100 meters away.

"Laser radar scans the car's surroundings in a 100 meter radius, letting the car know what objects to avoid.

A global positioning system in the form of a GPS keeps the car on its intended route with an accuracy of 30 cm, and video cameras are used to road markings and traffic signals.

"Some 7 dual-core 2.13 GHz processors and 2Gb of RAM are needed to make sense of the data collected by the car's instruments.

"Some cars run as many as 17 processors to dispense the computing load."

With all these technological advances, there are fields where the driverless car comes short compared to the brain.

For example, the finest digital camera sensors today are around 50 megapixels, while the human eye sees details equivalent to 576 megapixels, the RTA explained.

The innovation exhibition will be open every day of this week.

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