News Article - MIT Co-Pilot

Technology is advancing every moment of every day, and new advancements routinely come out to futurize our daily lives.  One of the leading fields that embrace this is the mechanical engineering field.  Mechanical Engineers have to adapt to every other fields changes and learn the mechanical and technological changes that lead to the most modern and efficient designs for parts and assemblies.  

So that mentioned, what is one of the most mechanically dependent activities that most of general public relies on on a daily basis?       -  driving a vehicular device

Each year car companies and their engineers develop new technologies to help their cars/trucks become more efficient, more powerful, easier on the eyes, etc.  But there is a new technology that hasn't been developed much that a recent group of mechanical engineers have been working on for a few years. 

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/mechanical-engineers-develop-intelligent-car-co-pilot-0713.html

The author of the article is Jennifer Chu, a news reporter at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and she is reporting on a developing story regarding travel technology.  

As the article discusses, a group of mechanical engineers have been researching and developing a co-piloting type system for your daily driver.  There have been systems already produced that have similar qualities, including assisted parking and surrounding surveillance, and the like.   Intelligent Parking Assist System was developed and released in 2004 by Toyota and implemented into their early Japan-only Prius lines, and later adopted by Lexus, and then other similar programs were used by the other large car companies.

The article was an extremely effective one, going into major details throughout it, and diving into the relevance to our daily lives.  She portrayed herself as a thoroughly reliable author, referring to research and sources throughout her article.  This also made her article logical and understandable as well.  

How it affects the Engineering Field

In previous years it was believed (with good reason) that this would be a very difficult task to fulfill, to create a fully auto/co pilot type system in a commuter vehicle.  I mean, it's easy enough to program a car with a guidance system to go where you want it to, without outside interference.  When you want to make a whole co/auto pilot system, there are so many outside influences that come into play: other vehicles, pedestrians, various other road dangers.   This new system involves more intricate details.  The developers integrated a human perspective into their robotic system. The team came up with an approach to identify safe zones, or “homotopies,” rather than specific paths of travel. Instead of mapping out individual paths along a roadway, the researchers divided a vehicle’s environment into triangles, with certain triangle edges representing an obstacle or a lane’s boundary. 

The researchers devised an algorithm that “constrains” obstacle-abutting edges, allowing a driver to navigate across any triangle edge except those that are constrained. If a driver is in danger of crossing a constrained edge — for instance, if he’s fallen asleep at the wheel and is about to run into a barrier or obstacle — the system takes over, steering the car back into the safe zone. 

How it affects the Public

While they are still working out the details, this would be a drastic improvement in the safety of public transportation if it were to be correctly integrated into the commuter-man's vehicle.  I am excited to see future developments regarding this new technology.