Hitting the revolutionary road

Cars and computers have been bonding for a while. Their liaison will soon end up in a fusion that will enable vehicles to drive themselves. Already shaken by the public anger over losing jobs to trade and offshoring, the U.S. is bracing for another major disruption — autonomous vehicles.

In the driver’s seat of this revolution around the corner is Raj Rajkumar, who heads the Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mr. Rajkumar grew up in Salem and studied engineering in Coimbatore — both in Tamil Nadu — before joining CMU in 1984 for a Masters and then Ph.D. A year prior to that, CMU had started its project on driverless vehicles.

The focus of his initial research was embedded systems — making an appliance smarter by marrying it to a computer. “An average American has more than 50 computers around him — from toaster to dish washer, TV to printer,” Mr. Rajkumar says.

These days, his job is to lead a team of around 20 researchers in what he calls “the birthplace of self-driving vehicles”, fine-tuning a 2000 model GM SUV to sense its surroundings better and react faster. “I like to call it self-driving than autonomous. They do what we tell them to do.” In a basement room, the car is deceptive in its looks, compared to a previous generation one parked next to it that has a lot of contraptions sticking out. The current vehicle is the 11th version built at the CMU lab — its laser sensors and radars are all hidden, and the CPU is buried in the boot, replacing the spare tyre. Every minute of driving generates 1-2 GB of data that the car, err, the computer learns and makes sense of.

The technology is still far away from perfection, and Mr. Rajkumar is concerned that recent entrants into the field, such as Uber, Google and Tesla, are creating hype around the technology that may do no good. “When Tesla made claims that its autopilot feature is twice as reliable as a human... one person who was a fan of it died in an accident. This is an imperfect technology and it should not be over-marketed or hyped.”

Gathering momentum

The race to build driverless vehicles gained momentum a decade ago when the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a competition called the DARPA Urban Challenge. “The challenge was to make a vehicle that would drive itself 60 miles in six hours, negotiating real life traffic conditions,” Mr. Rajkumar, who was then a member of the CMU team that beat 85 teams from around the world, recalls. In 2008, when General Motors and CMU set up a joint venture lab, Mr. Rajkumar became its head.

Most tech companies have a finger in the pie now, and Uber launched its driverless service in Pittsburgh last year. At least twice every week, Mr. Rajkumar’s car joins the Pittsburgh traffic through the city’s numerous bridges and across the blinding hillocks. He is also the chief evangelist for the technology. He took members of the U.S. Congress and senior officials of the Transport Department around Washington in a driverless car in 2014. Last year, the Obama administration announced regulatory guidelines for autonomous cars.

It will be a few years before consumer vehicles become driverless and Mr. Rajkumar is an absolute optimist about the promise it holds. Worldwide, about 1.3 million people die in road accidents every year, 94% of them due to human error. “That will be reduced to a few thousands,” he says. “It will empower millions of disabled people who are unable to move around. It will help senior citizens who get into depression because they can’t get out of home.”