![]() ![]() (They have ready access to a more challenging proving ground: Boston ranks rock bottom in Allstate’s Best Drivers Report of 200 US cities.) So far the team are only testing their vehicle on private roads, at Fort Devens, an Army Reserve property east of Boston. As well as the tests with pedestrians, trials have shown it can slow down a driver going too fast or keep the car in lane if a person oversteers. Rus admits that having the car take over is a weird experience-“Sometimes it feels a little bit sudden,” she says-but it works. If what the human driver is doing with the controls doesn’t match with that, the computer takes control of the vehicle. It tracks moving objects such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles and plans what it would do next to keep driving safely. Like the prototypes tooling around Palo Alto (Alphabet’s Waymo), San Francisco (General Motors), and Pittsburgh (Uber), the car’s software uses its sensors to orient itself to a detailed 3-D map of its surroundings. The MIT team tricked out their Prius with a camera, 4 lidars, high-end GPS, and electronics that sense what a driver is doing with the controls. It’s the concept behind today's safety features-like automatic emergency braking or lane departure warning-taken to its most extreme limit. But it’s designed to test a concept dubbed “parallel autonomy,” where a human still drives, and the car’s computer only takes over when the meatbag behind the wheel is about to mess up. MIT’s hacked Prius has the necessary sensors and software to drive itself without any human input. They are trying to prove that there’s a different way to use robotic vehicles to improve people's lives than the driverless taxi vision espoused by some automakers and tech giants, such as Alphabet and Uber. That (staged) near miss was a test of a prototype vehicle developed by researchers at MIT. ![]() The vehicle won’t budge until the pedestrian is safely out of the way. But a bunch of electronics hacked into the car brings it to a safe stop anyway-the system had already been tracking the pedestrian for some time using lasers and a camera. The driver keeps pressing the accelerator. On a fine day in a parking lot outside Boston, a man holding a smartphone steps in front of a 2015 Prius. ![]()
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