Timber on the digital road

- We will miss him: Chriet Titulaer. The futurist knew with his Home, Office and Hospital of the Future over the last thirty years to predict gadgets and technologies that are now the most common affair of the world. But the public road was not often discussed.

Perhaps for the best man, it was probably too far in the future to predict. It is only in recent years that tech companies and governments begin to philosophize what's possible on, next to and above the road. Of course, the self-propelled car will come on, but drones will also change the roadmap. And that is still beyond innovations like the Hyperloop and the connected city.

For years we have imagined a car in which you can sit down, enter your final destination and then do something for yourself. Take, for example, the science fiction film Minority report released in 2002, in which self-propelled cars cross the city not only horizontally but vertically.

And now, a good 15 years later, this fantasy seems to become reality. Pioneer in this area is Google's Internet giant, who has been researching this technique for years. Not unprofitable, but the design and fabrication of a device that is capable of taking full speed at full speed, does not take its own. It requires a battery of sensors to pick up what's happening all the way, to mention the complex algorithms needed to process this data. For example, such a trolley picks up the mark on the road, but he also scans all traffic signs along the road so that he can adhere to these rules. And that has to be translated to where the car can and can not.

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