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Throughout the twentieth century, the automobile and its infrastructure were
developed in such a way as to become the dominant transport mode for passengers
as well as goods in most countries. Improvements in vehicle quality have helped
to increase comfor, safety, capacity, and to reduce pollutions. However, the automobile
is still very inefficient in terms of safety (with more than one million deaths on
the roads per year), of energy (with an efficiency up to ten times worst than rail)
and in terms of space usage, in particular in its private form (where it stands
still for most of the time).
In order to meet a continuously growing demand for transport, the solutions for
industrialized countries now lie in better use of intermodality but also in new
technologies for vehicle control.
Indeed, the control techniques for vehicles have not changed basically in the last
one hundred years with the driver having the total responsibility of his/her vehicle
through mechanical impediments (steering wheel and pedals). These primitive controls
lead to inefficiencies and accidents. As vehicle safety and traffic engineering has
improved, the proportion of accidents due to driver error has increased with a result
that automotive engineering has focused on accident migration rather than avoidance.
The only way to dramatically improve (defined as maximum throughput per unit of space)
while at the same time drastically reduce the number of accidents is to remove the driver
from the control loop.
The major problem which has been encountered in the study of automated highway systems is
the deployment of this technology. Recent work show however that there are several realistic
paths towards this deployment and that the technologies are arriving at a faster pace than
expected ten years ago. We can now identify three paths which can lead to full driving automation
in large parts of the road network:
- driving assistance and demand management techniques on the road network;
- driving assistance or automation on dedicated infrastructures for commercial vehicles
(trucks and busses);
- new forms of urban transport (car-sharing and cybercars).
Our research projects focus on the development and experimentation of techniques for all of
these approaches.
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LaRA, a joint research Team between
INRIA and Ecole des Mines de Paris
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