A comic pair of googly eyes on the front of a self-driving car could reduce traffic accidents, a new study suggests. Researchers in Japan fitted a golf cart with two large, remote-controlled robotic eyes, making it look like the beloved children's TV character'Brum'. In experiments in virtual reality (VR), they found pedestrians were able to make'safer or more efficient choices' when the eyes were fitted than when they weren't. According to the researchers, pedestrians generally like to look at vehicle drivers to know that they've registered their presence. But in a future where self-driving cars are commonplace, pedestrians won't be able to do this as the driver's seat will be empty.

The phrase "the future of transportation" tends to conjure up visions of hyperloops, self-driving cars, and flying taxis whizzing through and between cities. But what if the next chapter of urban mobility instead gives a starring role to … the golf cart? In 2015, researchers at Harvard Business School investigated whether Tesla, the poster child of automotive innovation, offered a truly disruptive model for transportation. Their conclusion: A "souped-up golf cart"--not a Tesla--offered the most transformative potential. Indeed, these puttering vehicles, most often associated with leisure and affluence, just might provide a pathway toward safe, affordable, and entertaining rides for the masses.

Autonomous vehicles can add a new member to their ranks--the self-driving wheelchair. This summer, two robotic wheelchairs made headlines: one at a Singaporean hospital and another at a Japanese airport. The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART, developed the former, first deployed in Singapore's Changi General Hospital in September 2016, where it successfully navigated the hospital's hallways. It is the latest in a string of autonomous vehicles made by SMART, including a golf cart, electric taxi and, most recently, a scooter that zipped more than 100 MIT visitors around on tours in 2016. The SMART self-driving wheelchair has been in development for about a year and a half, since January 2016, says Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a principal investigator in the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group. Today, SMART has two wheelchairs in Singapore and two wheelchairs at MIT being tested in a variety of settings, says Rus.

Autonomous vehicles can add a new member to their ranks--the self-driving wheelchair. This summer, two robotic wheelchairs made headlines: one at a Singaporean hospital and another at a Japanese airport. The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART, developed the former, first deployed in Singapore's Changi General Hospital in September 2016, where it successfully navigated the hospital's hallways. It is the latest in a string of autonomous vehicles made by SMART, including a golf cart, electric taxi and, most recently, a scooter that zipped more than 100 MIT visitors around on tours in 2016. The SMART self-driving wheelchair has been in development for about a year and a half, since January 2016, says Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a principal investigator in the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group.

Once a secret project, Google's self-driving cars are now out in the open, quite literally, with the company test-driving them on public roads and, on one occasion, even inviting people to ride inside one of the robot vehicles as it raced around a closed course. Google's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now logged more than 190,000 miles (about 300,000 kilometers), driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads with only occasional human intervention. The project is still far from becoming commercially viable, but Google has set up a demonstration system on its campus, using driverless golf carts, which points to how the technology could change transportation even in the near future. Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who guides the project, and Google engineer Chris Urmson discussed these and other details in a keynote at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco last month. Thrun and Urmson explained how the self-driving car works and showed videos of the road tests, including footage of what the on-board computer "sees" [image below] and how it detects other vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic lights.

My day job, in lieu of teaching creative writing like a normal person, is writing scripts for blockbuster video games. Last summer, while I watched a play-through of the then-unreleased Gears of War 4, for which I was the lead writer, something odd happened. The game's story called for a massive plane crash, out of which a single robot, operatically aflame, was intended to stride toward the player. Within the game's fiction, robots have hitherto opposed the player, but we wanted this particular burning robot to pose no immediate threat. The game programmers had thus switched off the hostility driven by the robot's artificial intelligence, allowing the player to walk past the hapless robot or shoot it. Most of us on the development team, I think, hoped our game's future players wouldn't shoot. Just ahead of the encounter we placed what is referred to, in game design, as a frontgate--a kind of contrived environmental blockage intended to prevent players from rushing too far ahead, which can mess up loading times.

At MIT's 2016 Open House last spring, more than 100 visitors took rides on an autonomous mobility scooter in a trial of software designed by researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the National University of Singapore, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). The researchers had previously used the same sensor configuration and software in trials of autonomous cars and golf carts, so the new trial completes the demonstration of a comprehensive autonomous mobility system. A mobility-impaired user could, in principle, use a scooter to get down the hall and through the lobby of an apartment building, take a golf cart across the building's parking lot, and pick up an autonomous car on the public roads. The new trial establishes that the researchers' control algorithms work indoors as well as out. "We were testing them in tighter spaces," says Scott Pendleton, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a research fellow at SMART.

A team of researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) led by Li-Shiuan Peh has come up with a new infrared depth-sensing system. The new system, which works outdoors as well as in, was built by attaching a US 10 laser to a smartphone, with MIT saying the inexpensive approach could be used to convert conventional personal vehicles, such as wheelchairs and golf carts, into autonomous ones. Inexpensive rangefinding devices, such as the Microsoft Kinect, have been a great help to robotics engineers. Using the off-the-shelf product that relies on an infrared laser to measure distance, they allow for rapid prototyping and the ability to create robots that can sense and navigate in their environments without having to constantly reinvent the necessary technology. Unfortunately, Kinect and similar infrared-based systems tend to be a bit fussy when it comes to ambient light conditions.