Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

Honda's future autonomous cars may be just like KITT

Andy Boxall
By

2017 Honda Accord Hybrid
When you climb into your fancy self-driving car sometime in the future, your passenger may be the offspring of Pepper and Asimo, two of the best known and most capable modern robots. SoftBank, the company that produces Pepper, has teamed up with Honda, makers of the Asimo robot, to work on artificial intelligence for use in cars.

Honda is about to open a research laboratory concentrating on AI, while SoftBank’s robotics division Cocoro will help Honda give its software some personality, and infuse it with the ability to empathize and form friendships. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s an evolution of Pepper’s party trick of reading human emotions.

Recommended Videos

While a physical robot may not be Honda’s plan for your companion inside the self-driving model of the future, it may be something like KITT from the classic 80s television show Knight Rider. The two companies will collaborate on software and hardware, using sensors and cameras to understand situations and surroundings, while the software chats and interacts with the driver. The emotive and natural conversations that Pepper is capable of holding give us a glimpse of what the future may hold for self-driving cars.

SoftBank co-founder Masayoshi Son told people at a Tokyo event to imagine how it would be if, “robots devoted themselves to humans,” and continued, “Imagine that cars themselves became supercomputers or robots one day. Honda will be the first to adopt this technology.”

Just as we’re beginning to get used to voice control through software like Siri, and hardware like Amazon’s Alexa; asking a car to perform certain functions, or assess situations, makes sense in an autonomous car. If we’ve no real need to control the vehicle, why would we want to start messing around with the stereo, air-conditioning, or GPS instead? Much easier to ask a friendly robot to help out. It’s also technology that would benefit drivers today, ensuring we keep our eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. We’ve already seen examples too, such as the IBM Watson-powered Olli vehicle.

SoftBank and Honda’s partnership announcement comes soon after ARM Holdings was acquired by SoftBank in a mega $32 billion deal. ARM Holdings is best known for its chip technology, and is heavily involved with the Internet of Things, of which connected and autonomous cars plays a big part.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Andy Boxall
Andy Boxall
Senior Mobile Writer
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Stanford wants to teach its autonomous race cars to learn from their past
Stanford Audi TTS

Researchers at Stanford University are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to help their autonomous prototypes learn from the past as they prepare for the future. They have designed a control system that drives a car using a blend of real-time data and data generated by past experiences, and they're putting it through its paces on California's Thunderhill race track.

Stanford -- an early pioneer in self-driving technology -- explained the control systems in many of the autonomous prototypes zigzagging the world's roads rely on up-to-the-minute information to plan their next move. If a car detects a bend in the road, it knows it needs to turn in order to avoid going straight where the pavement doesn't. The school developed a neural network capable of powering what it calls a flexible, responsive control system that, to use our previous example, tells the car how fast it can go around the bend by searching through its vast data library for information about previous bends it has encountered.

Read more
Just like an eagle, this autonomous glider can fly on thermal currents
autonomous glider flies on thermal currents eagle soaring

An eagle soaring may look majestic but in technical terms, there is some impressive physics happening “under the hood” when they do. Specifically, eagles and other soaring birds take advantage of the upward currents of warm air, known as thermals, to help them more easily sail through the sky. What scientists don’t know, however, is how these birds discover and navigate said thermals. It turns out that artificial intelligence can help -- and it could offer an assist to drones as an added bonus.

“This is a big challenge, as it is very difficult to conduct controlled experiments with soaring birds,” Jerome Wong-Ng and Gautam Reddy, two researchers from the University of California, San Diego, wrote in an email to Digital Trends. “Our approach was to instead teach a learning agent to soar in a realistic environment and see if this tells us something about how birds soar.”

Read more
Can’t we all just drive along? The not-so-universal language of autonomous cars
Autonomous Driving Systems

The success of failure of self-driving cars — that’s whether you will eventually be able to surf the web, chat with friends, read emails, or even take a nap while your car pilots itself down the road — comes down to code. Every major automaker employs an army of programmers tasked with virtually the same goal: Write the code that keep a car rolling safely down the road to its destination.

The problem is that eventually, they’ll all share the same road. Which begs the question: If self-driving systems can’t talk to one another, can multiple systems safely navigate roadways without conflict?

Read more