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Researchers Test Drive Bus With Automated Steering
An anonymous reader tips us to news that researchers at University of California, Berkeley, have successfully test driven a 60-foot bus that controlled its own steering. Sensors on the bus detected magnets that had been embedded in a San Leandro road, and it was able to reach stops within one centimeter of its desired position. Acceleration and braking during the test were controlled by a human operator, but the system is capable of handling those as well, and has done so on test courses.
"... sensors mounted under the bus measured the magnetic fields created from the roadway magnets, which were placed beneath the pavement surface 1 meter apart along the center of the lane. The information was translated into the bus's lateral and longitudinal position by an on-board computer, which then directed the vehicle to move accordingly. For a vehicle traveling 60 miles per hour, data from 27 meters (88 feet) of roadway can be read and processed in 1 second. Zhang added that the system is robust enough to withstand a wide range of operating conditions, including rain or snow, a significant improvement to other vehicle guidance systems based upon optics."
who gets sued in the event of a crash?
The 19th century called....they want their trams back.
But can it survive intentional sabotage?
Placing magnets on the surface of the pavement would not be hard to do.
That can be a couple of hours here in Metro Atlanta.
Was it able to travel through traffic, though?
I would've liked to have been on a Robobus back in July. An idiot driver in an SUV cut our bus off, and the driver firewalled the brake to avoid hitting him. My 3 year old daughter planted her face in the fiberglass seat ahead of us, I was in a side-facing seat and almost went through the windshield and my wife got thrown into a stairwell.
My guess is that Robobus would've kept going right into the SUV. Would've served him right.
(No, he didn't stop and we didn't get the plate number. He took off into the night.)
Hey SUV driver; if you cut a bus off at 100th St. in Ocean City, MD on August 2nd, you're a bastard.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Nice, but does it drive in random directions if someone has set loose a bag of magnetic marbles on the road? I'd have a hard time trusting this.
--
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Ah hem! Press releases are not news.
I can release a press release that say, "ButterOldGuy has invented a process of vetting the most perfect VP and how any geek can get laid by a super model or better yet, a porn star."
wow, i'm almost impressed except we have those already for a while. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phileas_(public_transport) They were supposed to be driverless, but dutch laws reuires a driver to be behind the wheel of a vehicle... Don't know where they got that idea ;-)
Sure it can navigate an empty road, but what about once there are other cars on it or pot holes or what if the bus service needs a temporary detour?
Cool from a technology perspective, but I doubt it will ever be applied to actual street driving. Most likely it will end up with some alternative use like controlling the office mail cart or something.
And at $1300 USD/mo, I passed.
And that's not even in the expensive part of town.
Get realistic about your expectations there, bud.
I don't have bus-reliability issues. I don't even have bus crowding issues. I have bus-slowness issues. Much slower than cars. They make many stops.
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We use the SI system in the United States, not the antiquated metric system (of which some definitions were translated in the creation of SI). The "standard" units are proxies for SI units, and are all exact, linear conversions.
We use lbf as a proxy for weight (N), and lb (or lbm) as a proxy for mass (kg). They are not the same. We are therefore, very, very confused by European insistence on continuing the mass-force confusion by incorporating kgf into their commerce system.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why would anybody investigate this goofy plan? [ An oversupply of government and foundation grants from brain-dead administrators? ]
Why would we automate the driving of vehicles when there is a serious unemployment problem? Automating the driving would greatly reduce the jobs for drivers. Isn't the Teamsters Union rather strong?
What does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems do to solve the problem of oil depletion?(which leads to fuel costs that exceed the value of the goods being shipped?)
How does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems lead to the massive increase in transportation efficiency needed to offset the increase in fuel costs arising from peak oil depletion in the coming decades?
The oil-based system of single isolated vehicles worked when there was (or seemed to be) an endless supply of cheap oil and raw materials. But the 20th century is over. And so is the era of isolated vehicles endlessly blasting up and down ribbons of highways.
What we need is a system of advanced high speed railways criss-crossing the North American continent. Instead of having thousands of trucks carrying goods from LA to Phoenix, we need to be able to have a big diesel 'rig' truck be able to be loaded in Long Beach from ship containers, drive to the rail terminal, and drive right onto the high speed train car and be secured. Then the train will carry the entire truck to Phoenix rail central. The truck will then be driven off the train (by a local driver) and the contents be delivered to their local destinations.
A vast and efficient 21st century rail system is the only way that we are going to be able to get the order-of-magnitude efficiency increases needed to keep our transportation system operating in the coming decades of massive transformation due to peak oil shocks and fossil-fuel depletion.
Not by some stupid idea of putting thousands of magnets in the roadways and having robots do steering.
What's wrong with these people? What are they thinking?
"Live closer to their workplaces."
"Ride bikes to work."
Of course; the holy grail of all of us who work outside the house for a living. Except that:
1) The cost of living near where we work is dramatically higher, which cuts into our net income.
2) We drive a considerable distance, which makes riding a bicycle an unrealistic option.
I worked 12 miles from my house about 7 years ago. Got laid off. Nothing else in the area. Now my commute is 60 miles. I have three children in school and roots in this town for 20 years. I guess I should just tear everything up and move to property that's 12 miles from where I currently work, even though my taxes and food and other necessities will go up, I'll make less money, and generally cause chaos in my family.
It's not always so simple.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Both optical and magnetic guidance systems typically use ultrasonic sensors for nearby (less than ~100 feet) obstacle detection. At highway speeds that's not enough to stop before hitting something that's at a dead stop, but it is enough to tell when someone cuts you off, or if there are construction barrels in the road, or if there is a pedestrian crossing in front of the bus.
Not that it couldn't also be combined with an optical system -- I think that's a good idea -- I just doubt the system is intended to work exclusively with magnets.
And optical systems -- even your human-based one -- really don't do well in sleet and other similar conditions. I'd bet that most people would greatly appreciate a weather-proof center-of-roadway indicator if they had to drive in such conditions. Your windshield is obscured, limiting the available information, and you often rely on things like tire tracks, nearby traffic, and off-road objects for navigation. In some case it can be done, but in some it cannot; it's obviously less reliable, and it's certainly not the way you'd teach someone (or something) to drive most of the time.
1995 Called... San Diego Anyone?
The Carpool lanes in San Diego I15 had magnets put in them over 10 years ago and fully autonomous GM cars navigated the roads effortlessly.
This was almost 15 freaking yeats ago...
Anyone so NOT impressed by this?
.
not every worker is a twenty-something geek, not every job puts you in a sleek glass tower and not every city has a climate as benign as southern California.
Yeah, but can its new-fangled computer brain defy the laws of physics and jump the bus over an incomplete highway overpass at 70 mph? I didn't think so. Until we can make an artificial replacement for Keanu Reeves, I won't trust it. It's gotta be able to say, "I know kung-fu" too.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Yes, that's the first thing I was thinking too.
We have had these for a while and were recently taken back into service after a crash (which was unfortunately caused by an operator forcing an override)
Does your wife work?
If not, then your family exists to provide support for you so that you can in turn work and provide financial support for them. Are your roots in that town so deep that you will spend 4-6 gallons of gas every work day just to prevent "chaos"? Are your kids going to be unable to make new friends or to keep in touch with old ones?
I don't ask this lightly. Why do you think your family wouldn't support you if you needed to move to a place closer to your workplace? Is your skillset so specific or so limited that you couldn't successfully move to a completely different part of the country?
I have trouble believing that anyone posting here on /. is unskilled. Every poster on this site has something interesting to say, and more than once I've been made a little more knowledgeable by another poster here. So I don't have any doubt that you could move somewhere else and make it work. But I don't understand why you wouldn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoPmKiDw-y0
Having automated buses and solving oil dependency are orthogonal to each other. I don't know what's wrong with you, or what you're thinking, but not every single technological advance has to solve the oil depletion problem.
Besides, they made no mention that the buses have to be gasoline powered in order for the automation to work. Actually in my neck of the woods we have electric and natural gas buses, and I've heard about hydrogen powered buses as well.
Also, an efficient 21st century rail system is a great idea but I doubt they're going to lay track from my block to my downtown. Buses will have their place for a long time, if not to just be the "last mile" of mass transit from a hub to your block.
I really think its wonderful what they're doing, road sensor based tracking is probably going to be the technology that wins, not optical recognition. Especially for things like buses with set routes. And as for you saying
Why would we automate the driving of vehicles when there is a serious unemployment problem? Automating the driving would greatly reduce the jobs for drivers. Isn't the Teamsters Union rather strong?
That's ridiculous. Automation is the cornerstone of our civilization. FREEING ourselves from needing bus drivers means we have more utility to do other things. Even if it does immediately put people out of a job, In the long run it will be ultimately beneficial.
Why would we automate the driving of vehicles when there is a serious unemployment problem?
The economy will see no lost jobs. Saving the cost of "busdriver" jobs will allow for the creation of other jobs elsewhere. The money normally spent on drivers will go toward increasing demand for other goods or services. That increased demand will create more jobs, and because inefficiency was removed the jobs that replace "busdriver" jobs will be more numerous and better paying. So, if unemployment is a problem, making bus drivers obsolete is a good choice.
What does putting hundreds of thousands of expensive magnets in the road systems do to solve the problem of oil depletion?
For one, making buses cheaper (no driver) will allow more public transport, and by that, less people will have to rely on public vehicles. If normal suburban roads can double as LRT 'tracks' suburbs just became screamingly efficient.
What we need is a system of advanced high speed railways
Well, this system will allow normal roads to double as light rail, which is not quite 'crisscrossing North America', but making city transportation more efficient is a good first step.
Should read: "less people will have to rely on private vehicles"
While this tech. alone won't be of much use I could see it being part of a more sophisticated automated driving system. Car makers already have automatic cruise control, colision avoidance systems, radar etc either available or in developement so I think a system combining these technologies might not be that far into the future.
Imagine a HOV type lane that allowed drivers of compatible vehicles to travel at 100+ mph within a foot or two of each other. The fuel savings due to the aerodynamic advantages of drafting as well as the lack of stop and go driving could be substantial and if it allowed cities to put off adding additional lanes of traffic it might actually pay for itself.
For a vehicle traveling 60 miles per hour, data from 27 meters (88 feet) of roadway can be read and processed in 1 second.
Well I would hope so, since 88 feet is the distance it travels in 1 second at 60 MPH. Otherwise it would be processing the roadway behind it. Perhaps they should say ... data from 27 meters (88 feet) of roadway must be read and processed in 1 second.
...a car with anti-lock brakes still rear-ends someone?
"Cars that drive themselves" won't arrive as a new option in model year 20XX. They'll encroach bit by bit, following in the footsteps of automatic spark advance, electric starters, power steering, power brakes, automatic transmission, cruise control, electronic fuel injection, anti-lock brakes, traction control, collision avoidance, self-parking...
When you finally do get a car that can "drive itself", you'll probably be too busy talking on your cell phone and using your extended navigation/information center to notice.
The embedded magnets make this a non-event. Vehivles guided by ground embedded markes have been in uuse for decades.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, my wife works. And she makes considerably more than I do, and is much more highly placed. A diminution or loss of her salary would be nearly catastrophic at this point in our lives.
The roots we have are family; we're all based within an hour's drive of family and we're very close; and one of my children is an athlete and the school that he's in is highly ranked for that sport. To name but a couple of other examples.
Absent the social/familial/work roots, I have no doubt my family would support me and I am certain I could find work in a large metro area anywhere. My skillset is sufficiently unique that weathered the layoff with pretty much no break in compensation (I got my new job offer the day I went off payroll at the old company.)
I'm also taking a vehicle and converting it to a plug-in electric vehicle, so the gas expenditure will, within about 12 months, hopefully become moot. :)
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
It will not take long for someone to lay down enough magnets to move the bus to where they want it to go — such as a neighbor's pool...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
+1
In aviation, planes have had autopilots for years (and recently, autoland systems), yet there is no giant puzzle as to who is responsible if the AP-equipped plane crashes: from the US aviation regulations, "The pilot in command is responsible at all times for the safe operation of the aircraft". Maybe a similar principle for cars is needed.
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
Been done already -- Intermodal Transportation
An aircraft autopilot is also ready to be disengaged at any moment by the pilot if he thinks he needs to. Indeed, there has been at least one serious airliner accident caused by the pilot inadvertently disengaging the autopilot but not realizing it until it was too late.
An automated car which can drive fully independently will be a total game-changer. An automated car which requires the driver to still pay attention and be ready to take over control at all times is much less interesting.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Apart from guiding the bus, the system will also stop your change from rolling too far..
Insert
"I need to get off this bus, this is my stop!"
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Timmy"
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
First, this is basically Demo '97 technology. The CALTRANS PATH people have been fooling around with this for years. I saw this around 1990 or so up at the CALTRANS Richmond test facility. Automated lane following was demonstrated in 1959 by General Motors with Firebird III.
About the only justification for this is to improve stop accuracy at bus stops so the bus can get close to the curb without scraping the tires. A bit of automated parking assistance there might be helpful. A neat trick would be to use rear wheel steering so that when the bus pulls up to the curb, the bus ends up parallel to the curb. Let the driver drive the front end, and put the back end on autopilot. This would be a big help for articulated buses, which tend to stop with the trailer hanging out in an adjacent lane, and might allow for smaller bus stop zones.
This is far more primitive than DARPA Grand Challenge technologies.
Isolate them from people. Remove the unpredictable.
http://www.ultraprt.com/heathrow.htm
Deleted
The human driver performs many critical tasks other than steering. Braking for vehicles or pedestrians moving into its path, making judgments about pulling over to the curb among illegally parked vehicles, arguing with fare cheats, crackheads and the homeless, etc.
Its not likely that these other requirements for a driver's presence will be eliminated any time soon. Meanwhile, keeping the driver in charge of steering keeps him paying attention to road conditions. Note how many pilots take naps while on autopilot (both at the same time, sadly).
The systems in which an automated steering system could work safely are essentially identical to elevated railways, monorails, or subways. In other words, grade separated transit systems.
Have gnu, will travel.
Las Vegas has had an automated bus line for a few years now. It's called the MAX and it's actually on the way of becoming obsolete, being replaced with the ACE line, which is supposed to connect all the cities in Greater Las Vegas. (The RTC has removed their page on MAX already)
However, the MAX and ACE lines use optical technology, meaning they only need a painted line to operate. It's kinda cool, riding in a bus that follows a line just like those robot kits you give to kids.
(Here's to hoping we've PWNed Berkley!)
The GM Firebird III was doing this 50 years ago.
Once this is better than the **average** driver,
it will be required. (by law or to get insurance)
The death rate for idiots will definitely go down.
It's much less clear what will happen with skilled
drivers. They don't have to face the idiots, but
they can't avoid road problems either.
This bus automated steering project is being investigated as part of an overall BRT line, running from Berkeley to San Leandro. The BRT would have buses running in dedicated lanes making fewer stops (roughly every 1/4 mile). The BRT, running on 3-minute headways, would be substantially faster than cars, due to signal prioritization and the exclusive lanes.
If the BRT project goes forward, it could serve as a model all over the US, providing quality public transit (comparable to tram or light-rail) but at tiny fraction of the cost.
The International System of Units is a metric system.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Agreed, and if there were no provisions to manually disengage the auto-drive system, then there could be liability on the manufacturer - hopefully they will put in a mechanism similar to the cruise control auto-disconnecting when you tap the brakes.
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
... when somebody parks in front of the bus stop? Is the bus smart enough not to collide with an illegally-parked car?
the system is robust enough to withstand a wide range of operating conditions, including rain or snow
So....magnets placed in the road and sensors in the bus are sensitive enough to compensate for an 8" difference in vertical distance? Riiiight.
Not saying this is totally useless, but test in a northeast winter before you spout off about 'snow'.
Hal: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
come to think of it, Keanu is just this side of a clever IRC bot.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
I've told people for years that if the same level of licensing and regulation was applied to automobiles that is applied to aviation, accidents would be uncommon enough to be newsworthy when they happened.
Of course it would accomplish this by keeping 90% of current drivers and 90% of current vehicles off the road entirely.
Personally, I'd leave it to a coackroach (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/03/0426258) to park my car/bus/van.
Not many people bringing up the main problem with this system!!! It doesn't see people!! This system has the same problem as automated warehouse systems. The robots do a good job as long as nothing goes wrong and no people have to enter the system to fix the problem! Effectively a death penalty for jaywalking!! I can also see a problem with the car that died in the driving lane being punted halfway to the city by this oblivious behemoth!!
Forget buses with automated steering. Let's work on an immediate need -- trains with automated braking!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phileas_(public_transport)
"Instead of having thousands of trucks carrying goods from LA to Phoenix, we need to be able to have a big diesel 'rig' truck be able to be loaded in Long Beach from ship containers, drive to the rail terminal, and drive right onto the high speed train car and be secured. Then the train will carry the entire truck to Phoenix rail central. The truck will then be driven off the train (by a local driver) and the contents be delivered to their local destinations."
You just described a bad version of a good old idea called Intermodal Freight.
Transporting a truck for every trailer is a huge waste, which is why we don't do it. Transporting the wheels and landing gear under the trailer also uses up valuable cargo space.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
...didn't the bus test drive the researchers?
The system can process 27 meters in 1 second? Not good enough!! 60 miles per hour IS 27 meters per second. A robust real time control system needs to be at least twice as fast as this.
"Cars that drive themselves" won't arrive as a new option in model year 20XX.
Besides, by that time we'll have to worry about Dr. Wily and fighting robots.
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No one said that having ABS would stop you from rear ending someone. Merely that it would stop you faster if you hit the brakes too hard and started to slide. If you're still rear ending people *with* ABS, then you need to think about one of two things. Firstly, driving further away from the guy in front of you. Or secondly inventing a system like this one that does the driving far enough away automatically.
Sensors in the road is *so* twentieth century. ;)
The better solution is to teach the vehicle to see and hear, though those words won't mean quite the same to a device that can access GPS, radio, and other forms of information not available to human senses.
Every time some *#!head cuts me off in traffic, changes lanes without signaling or generally acts like they're the only ones on the road, I make a little prayer that someday we'll be smart enough to let our cars drive for us. Not all the time; certainly "manual" will still have its uses, but at least in congested freeway settings it makes far more sense to get hot-headed, slow-reacting humans off the steering wheel.
Snow plows have used magnetic guidance such as this for years now: http://www.path.berkeley.edu/PATH/Research/snowplow/
CalTrans started using a lane marker system on I-80 over Donner Pass in 1998: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/29/MN172839.DTL
There's still an operator, but it's not the airport shuttle either. You probably want a person to operate the blade, and make other decisions that vary with the conditions created by each storm. Keeping the operator safe (and keeping an expensive asset out of the ditch) is worthwhile, especially when time is a factor.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
I was once on a school bus after a snowfall. The bus was travelling up a hill where it lost traction, and proceeded to "slide" in reverse toward the frigid Puget Sound in Washington state U.S.A. The driver had downshifted in response, but could not re-establish friction. He ordered the remaining children to pile on the seats over the rear wheels. I thought about bailing before the velocity of the bus increased to a speed that would be dangerous to jump out the doors, but I complied. The wheels pressed to the pavement, and the reverse direction slowed with the wheels rotating in the forward direction during the entire incident. The grip came and we proceeded up the hill. To automate such a scenerio would take a tremendous amount of forsight and aptitude on the programmers part!