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EU Reserves a Frequency For Talking Cars
Iddo Genuth writes "The European Commission has recently decided to reserve, across Europe, part of the radio spectrum for smart vehicle communications systems. The decision is part of the Commission's overall fight against road accidents and traffic jams, and the hope is that vehicles' developers will create wireless communication technology that will allow cars to 'talk' to other cars and to the road infrastructure providers."
I remember hearing something about a windows car going bsod and locking someone in for 2 hours in the sun.
No laughing matter, unless that someone is bill gates, mitch bainwol, or some bastardized clone combination of the two.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.
Hmm... Why I didn't patent this 15 years ago when I dreamed Ad-hoc network between cars and road-network?
Car would warn about cars ahead what has got flat tiers, ice on the road or water on road so the speed is needed to lower for safety. Cars would inform about traffic jams and suggest alternative routes, all cars communicating so all cars are not driving to same alternative route so it would be jammed. Computer would inform about safety range between cars so there would not be so deadly road accidents.
Speed signs next to road would tell the car what is current max speed and computer set speedlimit for car so driver cant speed.
Cars with IR cameras can inform driver about animals side of road and when driver confirms it, the warning is send cars coming behind so they can slow down if needed etc.
Problems actually is few, car should not be able to control car so you cant brake or it would brake automatically (if crakers gets hands this, bad thing) etc.
Cars should include information of register plate on them and GPS data, but this information should not be able to use by goverment or any other party to track citizens... Actually that is now already possible with all kind credit/bonus cards and few models has GPS with tracking devices etc.
Mayby I keep my second car from -90 what does not include computer at all, but has still lots of nice things like electronic windows control, automatic air conditioning etc.
btw, this firefox what use Qt and not GTK+, is bretty nice...
There used to be an ad here in Germany that showed a long row of cars, tightly packed after one another. Caption: "In principle, that's the right approach. Now everybody please go 240 km/h (150mph) at the same time."
It was an ad by the German railroad.
MW has told CNETAsia that an electronic fault caused the problem, rather than a system crash of the car's Windows-based central computer, as other reports have speculated.
Just to clear it up, the finger pointing concludes Windows wasn't necessarily to blame...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
This topic seems to be in everybody's minds these days. I just wonder what new security considerations that need to be dealt with it will bring, especially in terms of (location) privacy. Who will be allowed to "talk" to my car? Will my car identify itself -- and me? Inter-vehicle communication needs authentication, which seems to go along with the idea of RFID tags for the licence plates -- my car as part of my (electronic) identity?
And, of course, new business opportunities: what about a get-out-of-my-way broadcasting gadget for expensive cars -- and ambulances?
It's not just the technophobes, imagine the liability suits. The main reason cars aren't self driving already is not the tech, but knowing that if the tech fails the manufacturer could lose millions.
i'd rather see cars talking to each other, relaying their speed to the cars around them. Integrate that with GPS navigation and you've cut commute times, fuel consumption and accidents drastically and without exposure to liability. The cars ahead of you relay that they are slamming on the breaks, your car automatically decelerates. If there is a traffic jam, the cars report it and your GPS sends you on a back road. If cars know how fast all the other cars are going, they can go faster. One of the big dangers on the road is speed differentials. The slow pokes and hot rods mess up everything for the people going at the ambient speed of traffic. When *everyone* is driving 60/70/80, it's all good. The speed limit could be set dynamically.
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People drove on the left since Roman times, on the first true roads.
It's you Yanks who are, or rather were, being difficult.
Also, though the data is not solid, it seems that traffic accidents are rarer on LHS countries than RHS.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I've honestly been dreaming of building this system since I was 9 years old.
I'm in my late 20's now, so needless to say, I've given it a lot of thought.
Implementing an autodrive system like this on city streets is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than it will be on limited access highways.
And while GPS is very helpful, I really don't think we can rely on a system like this, placing millions of lives every day into its hands, based soley on GPS. I think the road will need to be embedded with RFID posts of some sort. They can be built into the 1/4 mile markers or something, and they could be highly redundant so many could fail, and GPS would certainly be used, just not exclusively.
This is compounded by the transition period where "manual" cars will rule the roads.
So we'd start by picking high-throughput commuter routes. Think of the beltways that exist in most major cities.
The left-most lane becomes the autodrive lane. Over the years, it turns into an exclusively autodrive highway.
So these first autodrive cars will have to be "hybrids."
After 20, 30 years when (literally) every car on the road is autodrive capable, that's when you'd see large rollouts of autodrive on city streets.
This is also a much more difficult issue because of pedestrians.
So my thinking is that people would get used to carrying an RFID transmitter with them. This would serve as their car key when they get in their own car, and it would also serve as a transponder when you're on foot. So if you're standing at a corner waiting to cross the street, the cars 2 blocks away know you're there and you'll be figured in to the traffic flow.
And I really think that a P2P system is the only way to do this. But I also think that we'd need large, distributed traffic analysis and monitoring systems that are capable of watching for malfunctioning or hacked autodrivers.
I'm sorry for writing so much, but I love this shit.
Anyway, one final thought, is that autodrivers would go into defensive mode when they detect a manually driven car or a pedestrian. I imagine a convoy of autodrivers in the autodrive lane on a highway, they're cruising at 70mph and a manually driven car enters the highway and is in the lane beside the autodrivers.
I imagine the software switching into a defensive mode, all of the autodrive cars in the, say, 1/2 mile radius is aware of the manual car, and they perform a monte carlo analysis of thousands of possible evasive scenarios, any one of which could be activated in microseconds if the manually driven car enters the autodrive lane, swerves, crashes, etc.
And I'm sure the occupants of the vehicles would be alerted that defensive mode is in use.
And about speed... a system like this, no doubt, would be safe at very high speeds. But until we figure out how to do so efficiently it would be such a waste.
And as long as manually driven cars are allowed on the highways, you'd need to keep it going slower just to be safe.
Don't worry. By the time this becomes a reality, simulators will be quite good. Indeed, you'll probably be able to drive in your simulator during commuting, while the computerized driving system in your car protects the rest of us from your mistakes.
I liked a system I saw in a few places in spain,
The traffic lights had sensors which detected how fast you were traveling towards them and reacted accordingly.
It see's you going over the speed limit and speeds up the timer and changes red faster.
Then it's a simple matter of running a red light.
A mobile P2P file sharing scheme would be the ultimate nightmare for the copyright industry. No ISP required, detection is nearly impossible. Firewalls and filters are not an option. Set up your car P2P client for the _type_ of files you want, drive around all day and upload "the catch of the day" to your home file server. At 54 mbps, how long do you really need to be in close proximity with another car to swap a few MP3s? High-rise apartments near highways would be treasure troves of entertainment.
If all the cars are linked why have traffic lights?
Pedestrians trying to cross an intersection?
Once you have a convoy of vehicles that can automatically drive within a safe stopping distance of each other
Also, the safe stopping distance between computer-controlled vehicles can be much, much shorter. Rather than relying on human reaction time to engage the brakes, which is at least a substantial fraction of a second in the BEST case, and well over a second in most cases, computers could coordinate velocity changes with sub-millisecond latencies. Each vehicle computer would have to know the capabilities of the vehicle, and some slack would probably be added for less than perfect road conditions, but stopping distances could be calibrated very precisely.
That, in turn, would mean that most of the time vehicles would be traveling close enough to draft off one another, which would make all but the lead vehicle substantially more fuel-efficient, even at much higher speeds. Some intelligent ordering based on vehicle size would help even more, though that would tend to place the largest (and generally most fuel-hungry) vehicles in the "trailbreaking" position where their fuel consumption would be high in order to improve the efficiency of the following vehicles.
I think your basic idea, a robot lane, is the most workable approach. Rather than trying to make cars smart enough to navigate safely when intermixed with manually-controlled vehicles, specific areas of the road would be designated for automatic controls. They'd still need to have some ability to detect manual vehicles in order to address situations where a manual vehicle improperly enters the automatic lane. Over time, as a greater percentage of vehicles acquire automatic control systems, a greater portion of the roads would be given to automatic control, until eventually major highways would be purely automatic.
Hopefully by that time, automation will have progressed enough that guidance can be added to smaller roads as well, safely handling a mixture of automatic and manual traffic. Over time, the manual traffic would probably dwindle to next to nothing anyway.
At some point, it's even likely that private ownership of vehicles would decline. Why own a car yourself if enough autonomous taxis are circling the streets, using smarter and smarter algorithms to make sure that there's always one nearby when you need it? Drivers are the largest expense of a taxi fleet, and eliminating them would make taxis very cost-competitive with private vehicle ownership. Or perhaps cooperative ownership would become the norm.
With fully automated roadways, I think bus and train traffic would decline. Fuel-efficient, automatically-convoying, publicly or cooperatively-owned cars would be cost-competitive with traditional public transport, with the flexibility and end-to-end delivery capability of automobiles. Automated cars would also eliminate parking problems. Even if your car was privately-owned, not a taxi, a public car or part of a co-op, the car could drop you off at your destination and then drive to a parking location, even if it happened to be some distance away. Or maybe your car could turn into a taxi that operates itself for your financial benefit while you're shopping. In any case, a few minutes before you're ready to leave, you'd call the car with your phone, and have it waiting for you when you emerge.
There are so many advantages to automated automobiles that it's an idea that absolutely will happen.
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