ULTra Robo-Taxi

irksome writes: "Found a link on msnbc about a driver-less taxi pod. According to the article, the vehicle has begun road tests in the city of Cardiff, Wales. The pod, known as ULTra (Urban Light Transport) could make driver-free transport a reality and not just the stuff of futuristic fantasy."

Comments

Umm. This is a repeat.

[SWPadnos]

Hmmm. Looks suspiciously like this.

I guess it takes a while for MSN to get old news from the BBC.

gangway!

[pangloss]

from the faq:
"We also plan a detection system that will automatically stop the vehicle if there is an obstacle in the guideway."

Oh that's a nice feature to plan for ;)
I suppose the original plan was to add big nerf-style bumpers instead so that at 25mph the unobservant kiddies would just bounce off gently :P

heh, i just noticed this one:
"What about vandalism?
We hope that the system will be a source of pride to the community it serves so that vandalism incidents will be limited."

In _some_ communities, *vandalism* is a source of pride, so "vandalism incidents will be frequent, persistent and guaranteed" :P There's a reason why this is debuting in wales and not nyc, eh?

Electric Eye...

[rufusdufus]

I met a guy at CMU working on vision technology for Mercedes. Ostensibly, the technology would identify pedestrians and make a warning sound.

It sort of worked too, at least from video tapes from a car driving down the street. It could identify human shape and draw a little box around it.

The guy seemed a little distressed when I pointed out to him that his technology looked a LOT more useful as a robotic machine-gun targetting system.

Funny how people can fool themselves.

Re:Whooo

[squiggleslash]

That's one way of looking at it.

The other is as an experiment. There are going to be limitations, and the first version is going to be expensive, but what's remarkable is how cheap it is for an early prototype system, not how expensive it is for a "replacement" for the car/bus/motorcycle/taxi/whatever.

As the kinks are worked out while a real system is loose on real roads, you should see a real decrease in cost, especially as others take up the same ideas. Remember, the cost is high for the system, but the system involves upgrading infrastructure and building a tiny number of vehicles. A city that's upgrading its infrastructure anyway, and a populace that's buying more and more of these things, should see costs plummet.

And 25MpH... That's about twice the average speed of a bus in most cities. Seriously - look it up. In Oxford, where I came from, they did a survey in the mid eighties and found that busses there were driving at an average 8-15MpH while in service!