No flying cars yet, but at least we’ll have autonomous buses cart us around if the Land Transport Authority (LTA) has its way.
LTA is currently paving the roads to roll out driverless buses across the country, with the goal of having them transporting commuters between towns and housing estates by 2020.
Under a partnership with ST Kinetics (the minds behind the army’s SAR-21 rifles and various military vehicles), LTA will develop and put on trial two 40-seater electric buses in locations such as the campus of National University of Singapore and Jurong Island. The plan is to gradually introduce the buses to other trial sites before having them run for real on public roads.
The buses themselves are pretty sci-fi. The 12-metre long vehicles are estimated to travel up to 60km per hour and will utilize a satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) and sensors to scan their immediate surroundings. Radars and sonars will detect other vehicles and pedestrians, while a rain filter will allow the bus to detect obstacles in a downpour.
But considering it’s a robot bus, there’s a very real possibility that it can be hacked ala The Fate of the Furious.
ST Kinetics, however, assured that the project will tap cybersecurity experts from Agency for Science, Technology and Research, NUS and Singapore University of Technology and Design to ensure key components are well-protected.
“Singapore’s need for high-capacity vehicles to address commuters’ peak-hour demands presents an opportunity for companies such as ST Kinetics to develop autonomous buses to address this latent demand,” enthused LTA’s Chief Technology Officer, Lam Wee Shann.
