Smart Cars That Learn From Their Drivers

(March 3) -- You get to know your car: the steering, the brakes, the limits of its cup-holder capacity and when that grinding noise is normal or when it's time to worry. But your car doesn't know much about you, beyond your pre-set radio stations and your imprint on the driver's seat after a 10-hour slog.

Maybe not for long. A multinational team of researchers funded by the European Union has developed a system called DRIVSCO that will help a car get to know its driver so well it might even drive itself.

The DRIVSCO program, currently being tested in a prototype, uses a complex system of sensors, cameras and image analysis to adapt to the particularities of a given driver, learning how the driver would respond to a given situation and being able to recognize when the driver is behaving irregularly.

According to team member Florentin Wörgötter, the system already is advanced enough that it could drive itself after being taken for a few hundred miles of driving school with a human. But since that is illegal, the system is focused on providing drivers with warnings when their driving deviates from normal behavior. Because infrared cameras allow the car to see better at night than a human can, the computer could also help reduce the risks of night-time driving.

"What we wanted was a system that learns to drive during the day by correlating what it sees with the actions a driver takes," Wörgötter said in a press release. "Then at night the system could say, 'Slow down, a curve is coming up!' -- a curve the human didn't see. Now we have a prototype that does this."

According to Wörgötter, similar systems that do not learn from their drivers could irritate those who don't drive like the program expects and get shut off.

"There have been systems that drive the way an engineer would want it to," he said. "Ultimately you want the car to drive like a driver, and not like a robot."

Still, getting into a brand-new car controlled by a passenger vehicle system would be akin to letting a baby drive you to the airport. One of DRIVSCO's goals is creating a car that would be fully functional right off the lot, but that also would develop a set of useful skills as it got to know its driver.

Whether there's a market for a complicated new toy like DRIVSCO in the cash-strapped auto industry remains to be seen..

High-end cars are already loaded with features, such as heated seats, passenger DVD players and individual climate control. Wörgötter believes the new system could be a hit for the luxury market, or anyone looking to emulate "Knight Rider."

"Very expensive cars like Mercedes put in a lot of individualization with respect to simple things," he said. "All this stuff you can store and then the car adapts to your style; we're just taking this one step forward, same concept."