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Will Our Cars Become Our Chauffeurs?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to this long article from EE Times about the 'Self-Navigating Vehicle,' the answer is a resounding yes. Many car experts think that autonomous vehicles which avoid collisions and communicate wirelessly with other cars will be the norm in two to three decades. In the meantime, the enabling technologies for self-navigating cars are emerging, from sensors embedded in the brake or accelerator pedals to more powerful computers. Already, partial solutions exist for adaptive cruise control or for staying in a highway lane. One day, we'll be able to do something else than driving our cars through traffic jams, saving us about two hours per working day. This is the future that engineers are building, but will you accept to be driven by your car? So many people like driving that the concept of a completely autonomous car might be delayed for psychological reasons, not technical ones. This summary contains selected details of the original article."
It's one thing to trust a computer to do your taxes, it's quite another to trust one to hurl you down the street at 80 mph without killing you.
Public transport, this is America.
Have a nice day.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
As much as I hate to admit that it might be a step forward, think about the time saved if all cars began moving as soon as the light turned green (instead of waiting for each car in front of another).
That would shave lots of time right there.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Having automated transport systems removing the human (idiot) factor will be essential to prevent utter gridlock in the future. The only other alternative is to stop immigrating people faster than we can expand the infrastructure they use. Yes this ultimately is the problem - highway construction cannot keep pace with US population growth.
In the USA, the risk of lawsuits will surely delay this kind of thing for a long time to come.
Sadly, that will probably mean more people get hurt in the long run.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is one of the few areas where I see the legal barriers as nearly insurmountable. What happens when the automatic driving system screws up? Whose insurance kicks in? Who assumes responsibility? It seems like the liability to automobile manufacturers who installed such systems would be huge. Would an insurance company really be willing to underwrite a system like this? Are you willing to assume responsibility yourself for the failure of an automated driving system?
Furthermore, you need black boxes and monitoring/recording systems - how do you know who was driving in an accident, the autopilot or the human driver?
Sure, planes have "autopilots" but there's very little stuff in the air to avoid, and lots of air traffic controllers and rules to basically make flying in a straight line in your own empty area of airspace possible.
Technical and psychological issues aside (and those issues are still huge), unless the system was flawless and perfect (which it won't be) I see the legal morass here as nearly insurmountable.
Yeah, and you know that the first time there's a significant crash that can be blamed on the computer (whether it's true or not), safety folks will raise holy hell, and who knows what'll happen then to the whole concept then?
Although this argument never held much water with me. Consider all the tired drivers, drunk drivers, old people, teenagers, and in general crappy drivers on the roads. There's like, what, 60,000 deaths a year due to car crashes, and that's nearly all human error. Can't imagine computers doing worse job than we're doing already.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
I suspect it'll be some time before the cars are completely automated. I expect that cruise control will be expanded to essentially become an autopilot. The driver will have to turn the system on and will be able to retake control at any time.
I'd imagine that the first fully automated cars will be airport shuttles and similar vehicles which make a repeated circuit of stops. City buses and taxi cabs will come next, other commercial vehicles such as delivery vans and trucks, then finally personal automobiles. How much would a long haul semi-truck operation save if they could run their trucks 24/7 and didn't have to pay for drivers? That's a lot of profit to be had and profit drives innovation.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Most municipalities (and small towns) get their revenue from traffic tickets. If you make cars that never break the law, then bye, bye revenue!
Yeah, right.
In my commuting it's become clear to me that most humans shouldn't control vehicles. Too many of them drive erratically, creating traffic flow problems by changing speed and weaving between lanes.And there are the idiots who think there's only accelerate and brake. Few seem to understand coasting is a way to slow down without causing a compression wave from your brake lights. Commuting would be so nice if we all had mass transit or Johnny Cabs.
If autonomous vehicles save 60,000 lives per year, and result in 6 wrongful death lawsuits per year, do you really think we will ever see an autonomous car on the road? I really, really doubt it. Americans would rather let 60,000 die than forgo those 6 lawsuits, and companies would rather let 60,000 die than pay out on those 6 lawsuits.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
By breaking them out of the normal traffic situations the navigation computers will be able to avoid having to deal with the random actions of normal drivers and be easier to trust during the roll-out. Once you get into the city autopilot will go off and you'll be asked to start driving. Over time when the system is perfected and the market is more fully penetrated you'll see autopilot everywhere, but it will probably start on dedicated for pay lanes first.
My $0.02
no the #1 cause of traffic Jams are tailgaiting and cutting people off.
Person A is driving a safe distance from the car in front of him, person B is certianly more important that A so he pulls into the space in front of A causing A to slow down. CDE are all only 3-6 feet from A sothey JAM on their breaks because they can not simply slow down but must now PANIC stop in order to not hit the car in front of them.
THAT is the cause of traffic jams, espically the ones where there really is no visible cause.
In otherwords, very poor driving.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
- All drivers are human: Acceptably efficient and safe. "Good enough" for most purposes, accidents do occur but not that often.
- Some drivers are human and some are computers: Confusion and unpredictable responses on both sides, terrible traffic conditions and accidents much more likely.
- All drivers are computers: Very efficient and safe. accidents rare.
The second stage is an unavoidable part of the transition to the third, but no one wants to move from the first stage to the second. Until we have a good process for that, we won't get self-driving cars anytime soon.The article focused only on the technology, but think about owning a self-driving car. When you get to work, why should it sit out in the parking lot all day when it could drive itself home and ferry the rest of the family around, then come pick you up? Most families could get rid of one of their cars. Leased auto-driving cars could take themselves out at night for fueling and scheduled maintenance. Taking it a step further, why I foresee a time when few people will actually own cars. Most of us will subscribe to services that maintain fleets of robo-cars, which we flag one down with our cell phones like cabs. If you take the paid driver out of the picture the scheme might be feasible. Especially if the rate of accidents goes way down and insurance rates plummet. The biggest losers from this technology could be the car companies themselves, selling fewer cars, and insurance companies charging lower premiums.
wasn't the robot road project cancelled in the US for exactly that reason, depite the fact that they can make robot cars/roads safer than most current human drivers, there is the whole problem of blame in the case of failure.
I saw an intersting Open University TV program about this issue a while back. Over 60% of the code was to deal with exceptions that happen less than 1% of the time.
Their major stumbling block? Anything their software couldn't cope with, there was no point handing control back to the human, because they wouldn't be able to react fast enough either.
The sight of 20 strech limos moving in absolute (down to the fraction of an inch) synch was very impressive... a bit un-nerving, but very impressive.
I think the problems facing robot cars are more to do with psychology than engineering. Look at how much fuss is raised over a train crash that kills people "not in control of the vehicle" therefore innocent compared to the number of people who die in car wrecks "in control" therefore less innocent.
I realise this issue is conflated with the number of deaths in an instant too, but i think one of the key "shock" factors is the helplessness of the passangers
A computer doesn't drink and drive. A computer doesn't drive badly. A computer doesn't drive emotionally. A computer isn't 16 and driving with a new liscence. A computer doesn't get tired. A computer doesn't drive when it can't find it's glasses. A computer doesn't get distracted by chatting with passengers, listening to music, putting on make-up, watching DVDs, drinking coffeee, or taking phone calls. A computer doesn't race with it's friends.
Computer sensors could (in theory) operate in darkenss, fog, snow, or rain far better than a human could.
Considering that driving is usually a fairly mechanical activity, I think that this would be a good thing to automate. Plus, a coumputer could be programmed to drive in a more fuel efficient fashion. It could moniter traffic situatons and rout around them. Because it doesn't drive eratically, drive times become more predictable. As more cars become automated, driving becomes safer for everyone. This stupid weight escalation shit of buying an SUV becasue it is 'safer' can end.
There will always be some people that like driving a car. There are people that still enjoy knitting, even though there is no real need to make your own sweaters anymore. For most though, I think that a car is a source of freedom to go anywhere they want, and not so much a pleasure to drive. For those people, it wouldn't matter who drove, just that they got where they wanted to go.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...it's that I don't trust the other cars on the road. When your car bases some of its navigation decisions on wireless messages received from other cars, who can guarantee another car (or something pretending to be another car) isn't LYING?
On a rural road, I could easily imagine thugs with a computer emitting signals that fake a deer-sighting or accident-ahead event, causing you to pull over and slow down. You are then easy prey to carjacking or simple robbery.
This is similar to spam and envelope/header forgery. For a long time, email software trusted everything that was said in the SMTP transaction and the email header. We're still dealing with that today, slowly adding features to try to limit email's exploitability.
Since car navigation presumably affects the passengers' lives, you can't simply add wireless warning protocols to the navigation computer without thinking seriously about how much it should trust those signals.