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Helicopter Crashes While Filming Autonomous Audi
telomerewhythere writes "A helicopter commissioned by Audi to film its autonomous Audi TT climbing Pikes Peak crashed early this morning. Four people on board were hurt, the pilot seriously. It's a surreal story — a manned vehicle crashes while the one climbing a mountain driven only by computers and sensors carries on. Here's more on the autonomous Audi, a project undertaken with the help of Stanford University."
Since when is a helicopter crash surreal?
Before jumping to conclusions....yeah I know this is the internet...
Flying @ 14,000' elevation aint easy for a helicopter, and it gets *windy* up there at the top of Pikes Peak. Until the NTSB completes the investigation, any comments about what happened and whose fault it is would be pointless.
There's also the problem that any time somebody using their system gets into an accident, they'll probably try to sue the manufacturer.
Oh, they will, but the roads might need a few upgrades. As soon as it can be proven that a car can drive better than a person when the person is trying their best to drive safely, cars will be favoured, since we know people sometimes deliberately drive wrecklessly.
Unfortunately one of the upgrades will probably mean no unpredictable human drivers allowed on the same roads.
As opposed to suing the manufacturer(s) and/or driver(s) like everyone already does for most car accidents?
The old saw about "We'll never have autonomous cars, because the manufacturers will be sued out of existence after the first crash" is pure nonsense. We already have an enormous amount of computer control in cars, and people are already suing the manufacturers, e.g. Toyota, claiming that those systems malfunctioned after a crash. Toyota is still in business, and the costs of those suits are just folded into the manufacturing costs, as always.
In the U.S. alone, human drivers account for 40,000 fatalities, millions of injuries, and $250B in costs due to auto accidents every year. It would take a pretty unreliable computer system to even get within an order of magnitude of what we do to each other through inattentive or drunken driving. Maybe Microsoft could manage it, but it would be a reach even for them. :-)
When the first autonomous cars hit the road around 2020, what everyone is going to see is the exact opposite - accident rates and costs will plummet. When that happens, auto insurance rates will be adjusted accordingly for autonomous vehicles, and soon you'll find that manual driving is not only expensive, but even illegal in many areas.
Human beings have no business driving. I know this statement bothers a lot of people, but the statistics bear it out. I, for one, will gladly hand over my keys the day I can buy an autonomous vehicle, and never think twice about it. Driving is a chore 99% of the time, and one that I'd be just as happy to turn over to a computerized device as any other chore.
As soon as it can be proven that a car can drive better than a person when the person is trying their best to drive safely, cars will be favoured, since we know people sometimes deliberately drive wrecklessly.
The problem is not with the people who actually try to drive wrecklessly -- it is with the rest of them, the ones who drive recklessly....
Never say never. It's just a matter of time. Even if some situations are hard to automate, a large percentage of all driving hours (freeway driving, I would think) could be automated much more easily.
The motivation to reclaim driving time is huge. People spend / waste a fantastic amount of time driving. I couldn't find global figures, but apparently Americans spend over 100 hours per year commuting (not driving in total - just commuting); the total driving figure in Israel is 577 hours per year; and about 40% of mothers in the US spend over 2 hours per day driving. Then there are truck drivers and delivery workers whose annual total must be closer to a couple thousand hours per year (i.e. basically their whole life).
Dishwashing machines are very popular, and how much time do they actually save, 20 minutes per day? I can't think of anything the average person more, that could be automated as easily, as driving.
Your $70 GPS addon is way too inaccurate for the kind of autonomous navigation they're trying to achieve. I mean, your standard SiRFstar III claims 2.5 meters of accuracy 50% of the time (a sigma of 3.7 m). That means you can't even be sure whether you're actually on the road, never mind what lane you're in. And that's only in a clear-sky situation. Once you're in a downtown "Urban Canyon" where you hardly pick up any GPS satellites anymore or get wrong readings due to multipath propagation, good luck. Your standard GPS SatNav simply always assumes you're on the road. That won't do for an autonomous vehicle.
You'll need something closer to this high-speed INS+GPS, the better models of which can be accurate in the decimeter range (assuming careful calibration). The ones I know about are all in the US$50,000 and above price range.
We were up on Pikes Peak last weekend staffing a charity hike event when the autonomous car itself also crashed, running off the road somewhere. The wrecker they sent up to fetch it also broke down blocking the road, so they had it shut down for a while getting yet another wrecker up the mountain to help relocate the first one, and get the car out of there.
That thing has some sort of bad omen surrounding it. Everything mechanical around it, including itself, seems to break or crash! I'm amazed nobody has been killed yet, especially with the helo going down on the side of the mountain (that usually ends very badly, so my props go to the pilot for keeping everyone alive).
Human beings have no business driving. I know this statement bothers a lot of people, but the statistics bear it out. I, for one, will gladly hand over my keys the day I can buy an autonomous vehicle, and never think twice about it. Driving is a chore 99% of the time, and one that I'd be just as happy to turn over to a computerized device as any other chore.
Human beings have no business being alive either. I think statistics will bear that one out too. Look, I recognize that there are plenty of activities, even plenty of transportation activities that don't require me to be in control. For example, we routinely travel by means that have someone or something else doing the driving (passenger trains, airlines, etc). And these means of travel are usually (at least in the developed world) safer than if I were driving myself. But driving is "do it yourself" mobility. In exchange for a somewhat elevated chance of injury and death, you gain a great deal of freedom.
Second, driving engages me. It is often fun to drive a car.
Ultimately, safety is not the key point of driving or for that matter, it isn't always a chore. Else we never would have left the house in the first place. And an autonomous system won't be able to cover all those needs that formerly used a human driver.
Actually, it's the opposite. Thicker air dampens control responses, thin air amplifies them. It's a bit like walking in water versus walking in air. The surrounding medium helps cushion the movement. In thinner air, a helicopter slices more in banking and cyclic control feels looser. In any case, thin air is not the norm for most pilots and takes extra fine control.
There are also specific maneuvers related to flying NOE (nap of the earth) on varying terrain that could have caused the crash. A rapid ascent/descent at a low advance ratio could have induced a vortex ring state, a pushover might have produced an unexpectedly high rate of descent that the pilot couldn't handle. These accidents aren't simple, and there's much we don't know.
I am a rotorcraft engineer (and if this turns out to be one of my company's helicopters, I'll probably be working on this incident...).
The helicopter crew is out of hospital. All four of them.