Somewhere not in the too distant future, cars can be controlled through our mobile phones. In fact, this has been envisioned about 15 years ago when James Bond remotely controlled his car in the blockbuster movie Tomorrow Never Dies.
With smartphones being an integral part of life today and phones becoming a lot smarter than before, this is fast becoming a reality.
In Germany, computer scientist have come up with the iPhone application which allows you to remotely control the car but so far it can only control the car that they constructed. The app is designed to control the car which has functions to operate the steering wheel, the brakes and the accelerator.
In terms of connection, the Autonomous Car is GPS enabled and uses laser 3D sensors and Wi-Fi with a video camera used to transmit signals to the iPhone. This camera is basically the ‘eyes’ that will allow the user to see where it is heading and is very much like the dashboard for the user.
The prototype is quite impressive where the radio transmission allows the user to control the car up to the fourth floor of a building which is quite high up the ground level. The group involved in this is called the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Freie Universitat in Berlin and the project is known as the ‘Spirit of Berlin’.
The project is to investigate how autonomous vehicles can change lives in the near future which is fast becoming more possible. After all, Google had already designed and launched their self-driven cars. It is still a long way to go before smartphones can be used to remotely control cars but at the rate of how technology is going, this could well be happening in the next few years, so keep your fingers crossed, or on your iPhones.