Like Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man, today’s GPS navigation systems are founts of detailed data that can sometimes be maddeningly challenging in the real world. Unlike that movie’s eponymous character, however, GPS navigation systems will soon get much smarter about applying their encyclopedic knowledge.
The problem is that while most of today’s navigation systems know where the roads are and what points of interest are nearby, they don’t know how to apply that information to the driver’s current situation, said Thilo Koslowski, automotive analyst for industry researcher Gartner, Inc.
“The navigation systems are not intelligent enough today to make this information contextual. Ultimately navigation must become much more ‘situational aware.’ Today it is only ‘locational aware.’”
For example, inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, Interstate 66 and the Dulles Access Road are restricted to cars carrying two or more people headed into the city in the morning, and to those headed back out to the Virginia suburbs in the afternoon. These roads are unrestricted at other times. But car makers such as Jaguar, Land Rover and Mazda have programmed their built-in navigation systems to exclude these roads entirely from their maps because of there are some limits on using the roads.
That's because the manufacturers didn’t want to show drivers routes that they could be ticketed for using at the wrong time, said Koslowski, so they removed I-66 and other roads which have similar restrictions. None of the car makers could provide estimates of how many roads in the United States are similarly excluded from their maps.
No comments:
Post a Comment