Topic: Autonomous Vehicles

Chris Smith investigates autonomous transport through a ride on a self-driving bus in Cambridge. In collaboration with the Royal Institute of Navigation, the programme discusses the engineering, operation and navigation of driverless vehicles. Contributors include Nick Bailey, Daniel Clarke, Jamie Wilson, Jim Hutchinson, Ramsey Faragher and Edward Cameron, representing the test service, local transport partnership, vehicle manufacturer, automation supplier and navigation community.

We have entered a golden age of artificial intelligence research, driven mainly by the advances in the artificial neural networks over the last several decades. Applications of these techniques—to machine vision, speech recognition, autonomous vehicles, natural language, and many other domains—are coming so quickly that many observers predict that the long-elusive goal of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is within our grasp. However, we still cannot build a machine capable of building a nest, stalking prey, or loading a dishwasher. I will describe how evolution may have shaped the algor