Road Map Towards Full Driving Automation

Automobile has become the dominant transport mode in the world in the past several decades. In order to meet a continuously growing demand for transport, one solution is to change the control approach for vehicle to full driving automation, which removes the driver from the control loop to improve efficiency and reduce accidents. Recent work shows that there are several realistic paths towards this deployment: driving assistance on passenger cars, commercial vehicles on dedicated infrastructures, and new forms of urban transport (car-sharing and cybercars). Cybercars have already been put into operation in Europe, and it seems that this approach could lead the way towards full automation on most urban, and later interurban infrastructures. China has great potentials to apply cybercars technologies because of the needs for high capacity and low environmental impact. Beijing Olympic 2008 and Shanghai World Expo 2010 could offer perfect large scale demonstrations.