UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January

The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed
on public roads from January next year.

It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the
tech, which would start at the same time.

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations
to provide appropriate guidelines.

The Department for Transport had originally pledged to let
self-driving cars be trialled on public roads by the end of 2013.

Business Secretary Vince Cable revealed the details of the new plan at
a research facility belonging to Mira, an automotive engineering firm
based in the Midlands.

"Today's announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in
less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this
transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our
economy and society," he said.

UK engineers, including a group at the University of Oxford, have been
experimenting with driverless cars. But, concerns about legal and
insurance issues have so far restricted the machines to private roads.

Other countries have, however, been swifter to provide access to public routes.

The US States of California, Nevada and Florida have all approved
tests of the vehicles. In California alone, Google's driverless car
has done more than 300,000 miles on the open road.

In 2013, Nissan carried out Japan's first public road test of an
autonomous vehicle on a highway.

And in Europe, the Swedish city of Gothenburg has given Volvo
permission to test 100 driverless cars - although that trial is not
scheduled to occur until 2017.

Competition cash

UK cities wanting to host one of the trials have until the start of
October to declare their interest.

The tests are then intended to run for between 18 to 36 months.

A £10m fund has been created to cover their costs, with the sum to be
divided between the three winners.

Meanwhile, civil servants have been given until the end of this year
to publish a review of road regulations.

This will cover the need for self-drive vehicles to comply with safety
and traffic laws, and involve changes to the Highway Code, which
applies to England, Scotland and Wales.

Two area will be examined by the review: how the rules should apply to
vehicles in which the driver can take back control at short notice,
and how they should apply to vehicles in which there is no driver.

How do driverless cars work?

Google's self-drive car combines video and sensor data to determine
where to steer

The label "driverless vehicle" actually covers a lot of different premises.

Indeed, the cruise control, automatic braking, anti-lane drift and
self-parking functions already built into many vehicles offer a
certain degree of autonomy.
But the term is generally used to refer to vehicles that take charge
of steering, accelerating, indicating and braking during most if not
all of a journey between two points, much in the same way aeroplanes
can be set to autopilot.

Unlike the skies, however, the roads are much more crowded, and a
range of technologies are being developed to tackle the problem.

One of the leading innovations is Lidar (light detection and ranging),
a system that measures how lasers bounce off reflective surfaces to
capture capture information about millions of small points surrounding
the vehicle every second. The technology is already used to create the
online maps used by Google and Nokia.

Another complimentary technique is "computer vision" - the use of
software to make sense of 360-degree images captured by cameras
attached to the vehicle, which can warn of pedestrians, cyclists,
roadworks and other objects that might be in the vehicle's path.

-BBC