A consortium of 15 European research institute and private industrial companies, have grouped together to form the CyberCars program. The program objective, sponsored by the EC, is to create a new option of Intelligent Transport Systems for city authorities based on road vehicles with fully automated capabilities. This article describes the cybercars background and the main objectives of the program, these being the improvement of the technologies in order to concretely confront several Cities with these technologies through demonstrations. In many urban environments, private automobile use has led to severe problems with respect to congestion, energy expenditure, pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of the urban life. Therefore, historical Cities centers are facing severe problems, traditional commerce in them declines, moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to tourists. Although public transport systems have seen many recent improvements (mostly due to information technologies), in many cases the car still offers a much better service at the individual level. This leads to a constant increase in its use, hence to nonsustainable development of urban transportation.
Samenvatting