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Robocars As the Best Way Geeks Can Save the Planet
Brad Templeton writes "I (whom you may know as EFF Chairman, founder of early
dot-com Clari.Net and rec.humor.funny)
have just released a new series of futurist
essays on the amazing future
of robot cars, coming to us thanks to the DARPA Grand Challenges.
The computer driver is just the beginning — the
essays detail how robocars can
enable the cheap electric car, save millions of lives and trillions
of dollars, and are the most compelling thing
computer geeks can work on to save the planet. Because robocars can refuel, park
and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs, they end up changing
not just cars but cities, industries, energy, and — by removing
dependence on foreign oil — even wars. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords."
(More below.)
Templeton continues: "The key realization is that while the safety and timesavings that
come from having computers as chauffeurs is very important and can
save a million lives every year, a number of interesting consequences
come from the ability of robocars to drive themselves while vacant.
This allows them to deliver themselves to us on demand, to park
themselves and to refuel/recharge themselves. On-demand delivery makes
car sharing pleasant and allows the use of "the right vehicle for
the trip" on most trips. Self-refueling means the people using
cars no longer need care about range or how common fueling stations
are, enabling all sorts of novel energy systems with minimal "chicken
and egg" problems. Because passengers don't care about the range
of their taxis, battery weight and cost are no longer issues in
electric cars and scooters."
I'm so excited!
I scoffed a bit when I RTFS, but the essays are really good and make an excellent case. I read them looking for gaping holes to point out, but really didn't find any major unaddressed concerns. I have to say RTFA is highly recommended. Read it, you won't be sorry.
Caveat Utilitor
...that this will usher in a glorious new era of alcoholism.
After all, I think it's the driving problem that really prevents people from drinking to their full potential. I can't count the number of times I've thought "I know, I'll go to a bar and get hammered!" and then, a few seconds later, "ahhh, but I don't know how I'd get home."
Yes, I think 2053 will have a few things in common with 1953 - a glorious time when men were men and martinis were brunch.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Because robocars can refuel, park and deliver themselves, and not simply be chauffeurs
Yes, I believe another name is, the bus.
And relax people, I know buses aren't completely oil-independant, however, our infrastructure isn't even close to what is need to support a billion electric cars.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
In any case I think that people would be better employed saving the planet by working to prevent so many car journeys being made in the first place by trying to put an end to Single Use Zoning and fixing the silly way we build our so-called cities. It's not as geek-friendly or glamorous as rolling out a shiny new car that looks like something from an episode of Buck Rogers, but North American culture has too much faith in high-tech solutions to complex problems.
Prevention is always better than cure. Better to go back to building cities so that they can meet their original purpose of putting daily needs within walking distance. Better to fix the leak rather than put a bigger or more sophisticated bucket under it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
One major issue with RoboCars is that any effective implementation of them will require substantial changes to our current infrastructure. GPS based navigation is helpful - but - RFID markers on roads is much more effective. Cars can locate other cars, as shown in the Grand Challenge, using LIDAR, but this is very, very expensive and sometimes unreliable. (The DARPA 08' cars used 70,000 dollar LIDAR systems, and i'm not too sure how long one would last) To effectively know the location of other cars, all cars would need a transponder, echoing its location and other data (speed, intentions, plans to change lane, etc) I'm not quite sure how long it will be before we can implement these systems. To get autonomous cars cheap, and in a reasonable amount of time, we'd have to start mandating transponders right about now.
This really will be a glorious future. Think about it: no more "...was killed by a drunk driver" commercials! Now, we just need to worry about drunk programmers.
...potentially more "I learned it from watching you!" commercials.
Kurt Vonnegut: "If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind."
The reason cars don't drive themselves is not a problem of technology, but of liability. Now, if there is an accident the driver is blamed. Carmakers are unwilling to take on that liability and themselves be blamed for accidents.
let me say, that the greatest thing that 'geeks' can do to save the environment, is to ignore moronic BS like this, stop having grand utopian visions, and f@#$ stop buying s@#$ they dont need.
Ok, so it might not be as extreme as all that, but have you seen the inside of a taxi? It's thrashed, and I think the only reason it's not more thrashed is that there's an taxi driver who would beat you up if you did something stupid.
TFAuthor says that people might want to rent their robocars out while they're at work. Like hell I would! The last thing I need is some jackass with a spiked belt ripping a hole in my leather seats.
If robocars become practical, and energy costs rise, it's possible that the author's vision will be inevitable. Still, it's gonna suck to find that some bum puked in my robotaxi right when I'm late for work.
Maybe we can engineer robocops to sit in every robotaxi to prevent the vandals from ruining it for all of us.
Why not start by coupling a frontal sonar and the gas-brake control to enforce the safety distance? Easy to do, and could save a lot of lives.
What's in a sig?
...be called "drunk", "on cellphone" or "putting on makeup"?
Personal public transit is not quite like a bus. Instead of just getting on and showing your bus pass, you'll have to tell the robocar who you are and where you are going. This is a totalitarian government's wet dream. It would be able to track your every move and completely deny you movement if it so chose. Robocars will usher in the new era where transportation, not just long distance travel, is a privilege, to be granted or withheld on a whim.
> you get all the freedom to stop and travel where you want to.
> The question isn't why Americans love cars, the question is why Europe doesn't.
Because in Europe the public transport infrastructure is much better, and the cities are denser. You can walk almost anywhere, and it is easy to take a bus or train to go further. It's much more convenient than worrying about parking.
I give a talk on the consequences of Moore's Law to a freshman class every year, and one of my topics is autonomous vehicles. This web site does a great job of summarizing the future of personal transportation. A few other points I discuss with the class:
(1) Mass transit as we think of it will largely vanish within 20 years. Cities will find it far easier to maintain fleets of robocars, and dispatch them right to the doors of residents, rather than maintain traditional subway and bus lines. The "last half-mile" problem of getting from the door of your home to the door of your destination will be solved.
(2) The authors discuss "sleeper cars", but they don't really consider all the ramifications. A huge chunk of overnight business travel (everything within a few hundred miles) will be taken over by robocars. People will go to bed in the sleeper car, open the door the next day, and find themselves at their destination. Consequently, hotels and motels will offer short-term rooms (for one or two hours) so that people can shower and dress on the road. A significant portion of the U.S. population will literally become nomadic, sleeping in robotic RVs every night, and waking up to a new destination every morning.
(3) Once robocars are widely accepted, human drivers will be forced off the roads very quickly. How? By 100% enforcement of all traffic laws with high-tech imaging (also thanks to Moore's Law). A human will be unable to conform to the ultra-rigid driving laws that robocars will handle with ease.
As I say to my students: "You are the last generation that will need to learn to drive. To your children, it will be an option. To your grandchildren, knowing how to drive a car will be as quaint a concept as knowing how to saddle and ride a horse."
The question isn't why Americans love cars, the question is why Europe doesn't.
Its quite an assumption to think that Europeans don't love their cars. That is not true.
They just don't tend to like to commute in them. European cities are congested places; bicycles are often a faster means of travel within a city.
I would much rather take a 20 minute ride on busses and fast trains rather than an hour commute driving through traffic.
I had lived in Berlin for a while. When you are downtown, you are never further than 200 meters from a subway or fast train stop. The rest of the city was covered by extensive bus routes, even at night. Cars were for longer trips, and most longer trips could be taken by train or bus in any case.
Look at Manhattan. The subway and bus systems completely blanket the city and the subways run all night. You have more freedom if you don't bring a car and have to seek out parking (which may be many blocks from your destination).
The problem really is that US cities and suburbs were designed ONLY for cars, and not for pedestrians. To buy stuff there aren't local stores (except maybe in big cities like NY) where you can buy misc stuff for your house. No, you have to get in the car, drive for N minutes to the nearest Walmart, park, get your stuff, rinse, repeat.
Right now I just googled for "pedestrian unfriendly" and got to this blog:
http://nishantkashyap.blogspot.com/2007/07/pedestrian-and-poor-unfriendly-us.html
The first thing that strikes you about any US suburb is the landscaping - beautifully manicured patches of green all along the road and absolutely no sign of dust - perfect settings to take a stroll or if your office is close enough may be take a walk to the office. But lo and behold, where do you walk? There are absolutely no footpaths, no pedestrian crossings and as if that was not enough you have absolutely no public transport as well- a total anti-thesis of a city like NYC and that is true for all such places in US - a lesson for those who get mesmerized by cities likes NYC and Chicago and start cursing our poor cities. Any day I am happy taking a cycle-rick in hot and dusty Lucknow or Amritsar than risking my life walking on the side of the picturesque road here where traffic may be moving at 100 kmps minimum. Everyone here keeps a car and absolutely no one walks - there are some crossing which have a no pedestrian sign - something which I saw for the very first time in my life.
With absolutely no provisions for pedestrians or public transport - I wonder what do the poor do here. Everyone is forced to buy a car - no wonder US is the biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions and also leveraged 3 time over because you absolutely have to buy and maintain a car. Moreover, due to lack of basic exercise like walking US is also facing obesity crisis and has been forced to spend a good amount of funds on health care and low cal diets.
Then I googled for "car free cities" and got to this website:
http://www.carfree.com/cft/i003_qz.html
After reading that, you'll begin to understand what really is wrong with car pollution in the U.S.
This is discussed in the article. There is nothing that requires there be a "traffic control" or that you tell it where you are going, but there will be people who want to build such a system, and we must create the technology with care to discourage such architectures.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fuck that, I'm getting something with a stick.
Give me a diesel powered car any day, instead of gasoline engines. It's so much better on so many counts... a little bigger/bulkier though. But way more power and fuel efficiency, simpler engine, burns cleaner (turbocharge it, or it burns really dirty and isn't as efficient)...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Marshall Brain has taken a much wider view of how robots will affect the future. By the time Templeton's Robo-cars come about, transportation will only be facet of a very major impact on the human race.
While he does make this conclusion about U.S. data, he is fair and continues his search to other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. From this page:
Nerd #1: Hello? Are there any girls in this room at all?
Nerd #2: Yeah, bring on the hot chicks 'cause I'm a hot stud.
Nerd #3: Yeah! So are we!
[Leela pushes her way to the centre of the crowd.]
Leela: I'm a woman, if that's what you mean. [The nerds gasp.] I don't like to play games, so I'll just say I'm a cyclops, I'm a spaceship captain, I'm the only one of my species and I'm interested in meeting a man.
Nerd #4: A woman! I'm scared.
I don't think he does a good job because he doesn't cite good workable examples of the technology in use. He just says "they've done that in DARPA" or some other high tech example. But things like DARPA are bleeding edge or pushing our technology to the limit. Those projects may not be feasible in actual mass production use. You can't simply say mass production will reduce the costs because if that was the solution to everything we would just 'mass produce' everything.
Now on to the battery problem which he glosses over. From the site:
People worry about the battery problem in electric cars. You need lots of batteries to get any kind of decent range, and at the end of your range you must spend hours recharging.
...
An electric robocar need not have this problem. All you care is whether it has the range for the trip you're doing now. In fact, having more range just adds needless weight. When it drops you off, it can go somewhere to charge itself. Perhaps it even goes to a special station where other robots exchange the battery cartridge with a fresh one, charged at night when power was cheap. Or perhaps to a super high-current charging station. You don't care, as you aren't waiting.
Ok, there's a bunch of contradictions here. If we reduce the range on the vehicle to just the necessary range for the trip plus the range to get to the charging station, then we have a car that is charging itself during daytime when rates are high. If we only charge the car at night then we are basically using the car once rather than multiple times which would be no better than a standard driver car of today. If we get even smarter and say we just need to replace the batteries then we still have battery overhead of basically one battery per a trip per a day! Also since the car will only have just enough range, we will keep driving to the nearest station with an empty vehicle (waste of energy) just to refill. Even if you dismissed all those things, found the optimal weight to battery ratio, the optimal charging station distribution station arrangement, optimal timing of charging batteries, optimal battery distribution management system, and the optimal vehicle, now you're still stuck footing the bill for what effectively amounts to a complete infrastructure change and implementation (battery production, vehicle production, charging station building and management, and finally distribution of all of those things).
So no, I don't think he did a good job. Try again.
How exactly does this solve our dependence on coal power plants?
Stuff.
I am in full support of this vision. However (and unfortunately), I think the practical answer will resemble robotic trains more than robotic cars operating on the current network of roads. Plus, the main benefits of an improved transportation system will involve restructuring the way cities and communities are built when they are not sliced apart and divided by acres of roadways.
First of all, while there has been some limited success in building autonomous cars, but we can't even get autonomous airplanes accepted into our air transportation system even though planes have practically been able to fly themselves for decades. Hell, most cities can't even get people to accept conductor-less subway trains, and have to hire college students or bums to sit in the front cabin.
The robotic vehicle would have to be completely isolated and separated from unpredictable human traffic and other sources of interference, if only for liability issues.
The best first step in widespread use of robotic cars might just be on the interstate highway system, where they could construct a special lane designed only for robotic vehicles. So you could drive your car/truck onto an interstate, auto-merge into the robotic lane, set the autopilot for your destination exit, and take a nap or otherwise entertain yourself until an alarm wakes you up to exit.
For incursions into urban areas, you'd want something similar to the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems everyone was investigating in the 70's. Take a look at the CabinTaxi system at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/cabintaxi%20photos.htm . There are modern PRT systems finally being planned for deployment recently in Heathrow and Dubai... however, they seem to be limited to airport shuttles and aren't really large enough to meet the promise of a large distributed network with many stations.
Speaking of Dubai, the biggest obstacle will be financial, of course. The road and highway system is expensive, but a lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the user in purchase and maintenance of their own personal vehicles. While the city as a whole would find the entire system cheaper if the government would purchase and maintain a smaller number of shared vehicles, good luck convincing them to finance both the network and the vehicles if they can just build the network and have the users pay for their own vehicles. Of course, car sharing companies such as Flexcar / Zipcar offer something of a shared vehicle, they only have limited potential unless they'd allow one-way rentals... where you can pick up a Zipcar at one "station" and drop it off at another "station", where someone else could make use of it. You'd need some way of getting the cars back to empty stations, but that would realize benefits in terms of reducing the area of pavement needed for parking if everyone had their own personal vehicle.
However, I don't think advanced transportation is the magic bullet that will solve all of our problems... I think much greater benefits will be realized by redesigning cities to be denser, more human friendly, and carfree (check out http://carfree.com/ ), so people simply don't need to travel so far from a nice home to a nice place to work.
So yes, I'm an Arcology nut (check out my MSSE thesis on my homepage). I think the Dantzig / Saaty "Compact Cities" book from 1971 had the most comprehensive plan for constructing a city that I have seen in my research (you'll have to look it up in a good library, it's fairly rare).
In any case, I agree that this kind of development should be a national priority, since there is a *lot* of room for improvement. But since improving the place you live and how you get around are kinda mundane, "infrastructure" issues, I figure we'll see little to no advances in the Western world until China develops the technology and discipline and manages to dust us with their production efficiency, and maybe eventually a high standard of living (said only half-jokingly).
Having run a DARPA Grand Challenge team, I've been through most of this line of reasoning. I'm rather less optimistic.
First, Templeton writes "The cost of accidents is arguably the single largest component of the per-mile cost of driving a vehicle", but doesn't provide justification for that statement. Total US gasoline consumption costs about $600 billion per year. The American Automobile Association says that US auto accidents cost about $164 billion per year.
Second, while we can do automatic driving in a situation where all the players are reasonably well-behaved vehicles, we're a long way from being able to do it safely in a populated area. Today's robot vehicle technologies have minimal "situational awareness". That's one of the hardest problems in AI. Right now, sensing systems are up to recognizing "obstacle" and "moving car-like thing". Pedestrian and bicyclist behavior prediction is a ways off.
The whole section on robot vehicles with incredible evasive ability is bogus. Vehicles are limited by inertia and maneuvering room. Cutting the reaction time from 500ms to 50ms would help some. Half of all collisions would be prevented if braking started 500ms sooner, according to a Mercedes study. Chain collisions are an artifact of human reaction time; with minimal inter-vehicle coordination, all the cars in a lane could come to a fast stop without colliding. But evasive action requires room.
Most of the estimates of huge savings come not from automatic driving but from electric cars. Especially little lightweight electric cars. You can get little electric cars now; I'm in Silicon Valley and I see them now and then. But they're about as common as Segways.
Zipcar indicates that the car sharing concept can work. With automatic driving, the car could be delivered to you, so it could be used in less-dense areas than central cities. But it's really for people who only need a car occasionally. Zipcar is $10/hour.