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Look, On The Road! It's Super Plow
SEWilco writes: "The Minneapolis Star Tribune points out there's a high-tech snowplow being road tested around the country. It uses differential GPS, radar, joystick-controlled plow, rumble seat, and a heads-up display for zero-visibility driving. CNN and Nando/AP had related reports. I wonder if they'll automate a plow conga line." These will still be useful for a few more years as global warming advances...
It seems like it wouldn't take much effort to make these devices capable of being controlled remotely. This could be useful if the drivers were snowed into their homes.
It's all fun and games until somebody loads Quake into the HUD and starts running over cars by accident...
-andy
Bonus points if they toss in a studded "Mr. Plow" jacket with purchase!
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Let me give you the lowdown
got to get that thing an IR vidio camera projecting on the head up display. Great it can stay in the lane during a white out but can it see the hot little bodies of children playing in the snow? Every two or three years a child in alaska (who has usually tunneled into a existing snow berm to make a snow fort) is covered over when the plow comes through. somtimes they are found immediately, somtimes they are assumed to have been abducted but are found 20 yards from their house when spring thaw ("breakup") comes... Seems silly until you ask anyone who has grown up in the snow how many times they have had hazardous experiences with plows. Personally I have had a plow traveling at 45-50 mph throw a great gout of slush at me that burried me up to the waist. Un-fun soaked to the bone and trapped when it's 25 dedrees, dark and windy. And if they don't care about children in the road, a 2000 pound bull moose will rip the blade right off a plow. Just ask the Alaska Rail Road that in one 360 mile trip has hit as many as 17 moose.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
More specifically,
We had 20 operators drive this truck with curtains on all the windows -- totally blind. They each drove a four-mile course with hairpin curves, right-angle curves and an S-curve, and we had only one small incident...
...when a small boy ran across the road and got run over by the plow. He wasn't on the map and kids are notorious for their small radar profile. They're practically invisible!
That's why you are supposed to stay back 200 feet or so from the plow. It may be slow but its safe.
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Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Cars behind him started to get stuck and the truck eventually sunk into the field too, before any of them realized they weren't on the road!
(Note that it rarely snows here and when it does it's only a few inches. That day saw 24 inches drop in 24 hours. The state doesn't have the equipment to handle that kind of snow. It was great fun!)
Soon, when we have heated roads, super high-tech snow plows, and rock salt that works 10 times as fast as we have now, we'll miss one important thing.
Snow days.
I'm glad I'm out of school, because if I was a kid, I'd be bitter. My kids will look at me like I'm nuts when I'm old, look outside, and say stuff like "In my day, we didn't have to go to school in this kind of weather!".
Bah, snow plows.
BilldaCat
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
After living in the snow belt for 20 years, I have reached the conclusion that the main problem with snowplowing is that they destroy mailboxes. Every year I have had to battle to keep a place to accept snail mail open, but to have it destroyed/buried by snow plows. At first I had a standard mailbox. That lasted until middle of December when it was crushed by the plow into a flat piece of sheet metal. Then I got a replacement plastic one. That took a few hits and sprung back, until a serious whack sent it off down the road somewhere not to be found until the thaw.
The next step was to teather the mailbox with a length of rope so I could recover it after being sheared off. This worked until the plow took out the support arm, at which point I gave up for the year.
The following year I had a friend make a contraption that included a pivoting arm on a shear pin. This worked for almost half a year until we got hit with a big one and the snow bank built up to 14 feet high.
Anyway, what I REALLY want to know is if all the fancy gizmos on this thing can detect MAILBOXES!!!
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Once, the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Siberia, Northern Alberta, Scandihoovia, all were tropical environments. High humidity, high temperature, year-round.
Since that time, the average temperature on the surface of the planet Earth has dropped some 14 degrees Celsius. We must put a stop to this horrifying trend before we all freeze to death! I *IMPLORE* you to leave all of your doors and windows open in the winter while continuing to heat your house to stave off the certainty of a new ice age!
Either our species is going to go extinct soon, or it will go extinct later. Who really gives a damn about how many million years (Written history only extends back some six thousand years, remember) difference there is between those two epochs?
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If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
As someone who used to do a LOT of GIS work (http://www.google.com/search?q=GIS) I can give you a good reason why it won't work:
we don't know exactly where the roads are located
Part of this is that which mathematical geoid we base the earth's sphere varies from area to area, but the real reason is that the engineers I came across tended to use CAD. CAD knows exactly how large things are, and where they are in relation to one another, but cares nothing about where the something is located on the surface of the earth.
GIS, on the other hand, cares lots about where things are located, but has tended to be less exacting about the inches and fractional inches.
A friend of mine had the task of putting one city's CAD maps together into a coherent GIS system. He regularly uncovered 30-100' errors where these exacting CAD maps touched edges. Even a 30' error is more than the width of a lane of traffic.
I live in FL, so we (understandably) don't get snow days, but I'd like to see them invent something that'll take away "hurricane days," those wonderful days when they cancel school in order for you and your family to board up your house...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
My old boss grew up in the Netherlands, and he was always had a good story or two to tell.
He'd always complain about how our roads (in Detroit) were always full of potholes while his roads back home were always in much better condition. In the Netherlands, roads are made of a porus material that actually lets rain seep into & below the road surface. In light traffic it can actually be raining outside while the road surface remains dry! So I told him,
"That's stupid! It could never work! Once that
rain seeps into the road and freezes,
it's going to make the whole roadway crumble.
He then explained to me how they overcame that problem. Instead of relying so much on snow plows and dump trucks filled with rock salt, they instead have special tanker trucks that spray a special salt water mixture on the roads surface. The salt water works great on these special roads because:
The liquid is usually warmer than the freezing point of snow.
The snow melts much faster this way
The liquid keeps the snow from refreezing below the road surface
The roads are much safer since the roads stay drier
Snow plows are needed less, so their are fewer potholes caused by the blades
Don't get me wrong, This is great technology, (robot lawnmower anyone?) but snow plows are not neccessarily the best solution to the problem (which is to have an inexpensive way to improve driver's safety). Frankly, I'm a little surprised that nobody has developed some sort of "lawn sprinkler" system integrated into the road to automatically recirulate a salt solution. This could work great on high traffic expressways where there is little room to move snow.
Just my $.02
High Tech Snow Plow Trucks
If you live in the Midwestern United States, you've already experienced several winter snow storms this year. Local road commissions each have their own maintenance jurisdictions, and where the borders end, they stop plowing. Wouldn't it be great if these agencies could pool their limited resources? The Southeastern Michigan Snow and Ice Management (SEMSIM) project is attempting to do just that by using technology to manage snow plow operations over multiple jurisdictions.
SEMSIM Technologies include:- Tracking the real-time location of snow plow trucks using Global Positioning
System (GPS) technology. Agencies can assign nearby trucks to border roads
of another jurisdiction to improve efficiency.
- Monitoring the air and pavement temperatures using truck mounted sensors
- Determining if the truck "underbody" scraper is down by using
truck mounted sensors
- Calculating the amount of salt spread using a computerized salt spreader
- Tracking the real-time location of the trucks using a map-based computer
screen
Project Partners:- Road Commission for Oakland County (RCOC)
- Wayne County Department of Public Services
- City of Detroit
- Road Commission of Macomb County
- Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART)
Project Goals: