Doing something else with your time

This is a nice research project, because it's an incremental step towards fully autonomous driving. Having the lead vehicle manually driven in the old-fashioned way is less scary, and also provides a legal locus of blame should anything go awry.

This looks like a far simpler system than anything which appeared in the Urban Challenge, with each following vehicle literally copying the steering of the lead vehicle with some delay proportional to their distance. It would also be possible to daisy chain the teleoperation signal along the convoy with each vehicle only communicating locally with the one ahead and behind it.



I don't think that this can easily be justified on environmental grounds, since even semi-autonomous driving like this is likely to result in more cars on the road which are more densely packed together, but it certainly is worth doing in terms of increasing transport efficiency and safety, making driving a more leisurely experience and reducing the cost of haulage (and consequently the cost of the goods being hauled).