This Tiny EO2 smart car is flexible and can drive sideways too!

Modern day cities are getting too crowded. Driving in heavy traffic or parking your car during rush hours can be quite challenging. This tiny flexible robotic car EO2 developed by a team of researchers at the DFKI Robotics Innovation Center in Germany can be the answer to all these problems.

The EO2 is a small comfortable electric car ideal for single individuals as big cars take up so much space. The car is white in color with butterfly doors and big windows. All it’s four wheel can rotate by 90⁰ becoming perpendicular to the body. These wheels allow the car to spin in a circle and even drive sideways. This feature could help tremendously while parking as even an expert driver many times finds it difficult to park in small spaces.

The EO2 weighs about 1,653 lb and its body can compress from 2.5 m to 1.5 m (from 8.2 ft. to 4.9 ft.) because its panels can slide up over each other slightly, keeping its 4 wheels on the ground.  It can slide sideways into parking slots somewhat like a crab.

Check it out in the following video:

EO2 smart car also has an auto-navigation system and many other functions to assist the driver. Its auto-pilot can drive the car safely and it can even park autonomously on narrow or congested roads.

The researchers are also developing the ‘Platoon’ concept to connect several such smart cars to each other on the road forming sort of a train of cars. The driver in the platoon can choose the autonomous mode and take his hands off the wheel. He can relax or read something while the car drives itself.

You can see it in the video below:

The car is still in the prototype phase and there is no word from the research team about when the EO2 smart car will become commercially available to consumers.

This Tiny EO2 smart car is flexible and can drive sideways too!

Driverless Car Soon to be Realized in the Near Future

There is a lot of benefit for driverless car even though it seems like it is not safe as it is considered a new technology. One of the benefit is it will reduce the number of car accidents which is caused by tiredness or drunk-driving which is caused by human.  In USA alone, there are roughly 5.5 million crashes a year which costs estimated to about $450 billiion. However, when compared to other countries such as India, Thailand or Libya, it is considered the lowest.

Driverless car uses technology to control the behavior of the car. Currently a few companies such as Tesla or Google has already bringing the driverless car to real roads to do testing. In 2012, Google announced that the company has already completed 300,000 miles of perfect tests, across Western U.S and in all weather conditions with zero accident whereas when compared with human, there is approximately about 2 accidents every 300,000 miles. Tesla has also sending autonomous cars between San Fransisco and Seattle with zero accidents too.

According to Google X Chief Astro Teller, the driverless car technology has already matured. There is no mistakes which will teach them something new currently. For example, there was a time whereby the driverless car was on the road during one of its testing time, and then a duck was shooed across a pedestrian crossing by a woman in a wheelchair. The driverless car then stopped promptly in front of the duck without hurting the duck. This is definitely not something that a human driver can do.

Driverless Car Soon to be Realized in the Near Future

The Future of Driverless Car

Based on the media coverage, it is easy to assume that Google is the only company who is going towards building a driverless car. Apparently, it is not the case here. Almost every automotive manufacturer is working towards a driverless car, i.e. Volvo. Volvo aims to test 100 or so driverless car on the streets on Gothenburg in Sweden by 2017 in order to know how the software should react in case if there is an unexpected scenario happen.

There are already a few situations whereby a driverless car is used in this modern day. One of these situation is in Pilbara, Western Australia. Around 50 driverless trucks are helping workers in Pilbara mining to transport around 200 millions of raw materials over a few millions of kilometers. In this way, it reduces the risk of human error caused by fatigue as well as improve the efficiency of the sites. In military sector, a driverless vehicles will help them in transporting goods without having to risk of losing the live of the personnel in the conflict area.

Apart from the above purposes, driverless car can be used as a public transportation too. As an example, there will be a small fleet of autonomous  taxis in Milton Keynes, a small city in UK, by the end of 2017. However, these driverless car will not be privately owned. You will need to book it with your smartphone in case if you want to use it. On top of that, it will be slow moving with the speed of 12mph (19km/h) which most probably suitable to poor, elderly, blind and disabled people.

The Future of Driverless Car

Apple working on a new iCar?

Apple manages to always stay in the news for some reason or the other. Latest rumor says Apple is working on its own iCar. A mysterious black camera-mounted van has been spotted moving around the streets of San Francisco which apparently belongs to Apple. This has sparked rumors that the Cupertino giant may be developing a self driving car.

It is a known fact that Steve Jobs wanted to build his own iCar and now the company may be working to fulfill “Steve’s dream”. There have been fresh rumors that Apple has been poaching employees from Tesla Motors, the maker of electric cars.

A newly employed person at Apple told Business Insider that “Tesla employees were jumping ship to work at Apple”. He said, “Apple’s latest project is too exciting to pass up. I think it will change the landscape and give Tesla a run for its money.“

Apple has hired around 50 employees who were previously working with Tesla and many of them are engineers and designers. These people have good experience in building cars leading to speculation that the Cupertino company might indeed be building a car.

Of course, it is also likely that Apple is working on improving its CarPlay infotainment system. CarPlay allows you to control the car’s entertainment system through your iPhone, make calls or listen to voice mails while driving. It also has Apple Maps and other options so that navigation of the car becomes easy.

Well, some may think what does Apple know about building a car, but they forget that Apple is one of the leading companies in the world for software and it can easily use its expertise to build an electric car. What do you think?

 

Source Redmond Pie

Apple working on a new iCar?