Write a 5 pages paper on transportation and highways. The self-directed vehicle history goes back to the Futurama Exhibition that was put on by General Motors. General Motors wished for electronic cir

Write a 5 pages paper on transportation and highways. The self-directed vehicle history goes back to the Futurama Exhibition that was put on by General Motors. General Motors wished for electronic circuits that were set in the highways so that they could control these electronic vehicles. During the 1980’s period, there were major rises in the technologies used in self-directed driving (Roebuck, 2011). Ernst Dickmanns and his assembly assembled vehicles that were self-directed and averaged a speed of 96kmph on streets that had less traffic. These technologies implemented were parallel computing, saccadic vision and Kalman filters.

This led to the European Commission funding 800 million Euros for the researches conducted on automated vehicles. A big breakthrough took place in 1991 when the United States passed the ISTEA Transportation Authorization Bill that included the introduction of the highway systems and automated vehicles by 1997. Roebuck (2011) asserts that in 1994, VITA-2 and VAMP vehicles drove up to 130kmph. This was done on a Paris three-lane highway that had limited interventions from human beings. Ever since 2000, many self-directed and semi-autonomous cars are being used particularly in industries such as mining and the military. On the other hand, a passenger transit system that is fully automated is also in its advanced stage even though a lot of substantial work has been made in this particular field.

Various technologies were used in these self-directed vehicles. The anti-lock brake which is a simple driverless system is presently in use. Even though these brakes require human assistance for them to function, they are regarded as automated due to the fact that they substitute the human effort used continuously when pumping the brakes. In a vehicle that has no anti-lock brakes, the person driving is needed to pump the brake constantly so that the brake could be prevented from locking itself.