Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad

This is just wild! A group of researchers in Berlin have been working on “autonomous cars” for a while. Those, of course, are cars that drive themselves, and as you can see above, this one uses a variety of equipment to monitor the road and environment. It then drives by itself according to all of that information.

The Berlin team has pushed the idea ahead by hooking the car up to an iPad. In the video posted after the break, you can see how it all works. The iPad’s GPS location is sent out to the car, and then the user can even track the car’s movement and scanner information directly from the iPad. It’s a cool use of Apple’s technology, though not all of that would make it to a consumer implementation of this technology, of course (and I don’t think that we as a society have even started taking on all the implications of cars that drive themselves). As a prototype, though, it seems like it works great.