Universidad de Alcalá drives towards the future with intelligent transportation

The Universidad de Alcalá announced earlier this week a new project that it believes will revolutionise personal transport. Although for many the notion of cars and buses that drive themselves seems more suited to a sci-fi film than real life, a team at Alcala is working to make it a reality.

The project dubbed GUIADE, which is backed by the European Union and the Spanish government, hopes to develop a central transmission centre to which real time information on the state of roads is sent and then redistributed among vehicles on the road with vehicles in the vicinity also able to communicate with each other. These “intelligent vehicles” are therefore able to detect any potential obstacles, know when the car in front is braking, and get immediate updates on traffic jams or accidents.

The possibilities created by such a system would be endless. One of these would be the improvement of flow of traffic improve reducing the number of traffic jams as all vehicles adhere to the same system. This offsets the factor of human erraticism which is often the cause of road blockages. Another advantage would be in emergencies as a signal could be sent to all cars and traffic lights to allow the passage of emergency service vehicles meaning they reach their destination much quicker.

At a presentation given earlier this week an automatically piloted bus was unveiled that was able to react to conditions on the road simply based on information received from the vehicle in front. Such developments mean that innovations people only thought possible in science fiction could actually be available to them sooner than expected.