| Driverless vehicles are obviously going to be part of humanity’s future, but they aren’t experiencing a great PR moment right now. Every day it seems there is another story about an incident involving a driverless vehicle hitting someone, mistaking something on the road or generally malfunctioning. Not to mention the justifiable fears of hacking that will be more top of mind when (not if) a higher profile example of this actually happens. |
| One rapidly emerging solution to at least some of these problems is smarter roads. Imagine a highway that could provide real-time data and insights about traffic, weather, potholes, obstacles and other road conditions. That’s exactly what a new 3 mile stretch of highway I-94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit in Michigan aims to offer in what is being described as America’s first smart highway. The technology works by placing smart “technology poles” every 200 meters along the highway. |
| While it’s a potential game changer for people to adopt driverless vehicles, it’s potentially even more impactful for autonomous driving systems in trucks to make them safer by helping these trucks to “see” a mile or more ahead on the road for potential obstructions. This feature alone, which would be useful as an early warning system for trucks and cars driven by humans too, may ultimately provide the biggest short-term benefits of these sorts of smarter highways. Now all they need to do is combine this with highways built from rain-absorbing porous pavement and they will really have the smart highways of the future. |
