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Vans Drive Themselves Across the World
bossanovalithium writes "Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 13,000-kilometer test drive from Italy to China which mirrored the journey carried out by Marco Polo in the Middle Ages. The four vans, packed with navigation gear and other computer software, drove themselves across eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert without getting lost. They had been equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles."
For those of you who want to know who made the vans, it was sponsored by the European Research Council. The lead researcher works at the University of Parma, Italy. Why, oh why do the summaries lack useful information? Yes, I am new here.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
The problem with autonomous vehicles is not what they can do successfully, it's what happens when they fail.
If I don't press my brakes in time to prevent an accident, I risk going to jail for dangerous / careless driving.
If the autonomous van doesn't... well... what? We can take the human "driver" off the road, sure, but that's not fixed the problem. So the second one person has an accident in an autonomous vehicle, you're looking at major liability and lawsuits directed towards the car manufacturer - whether or not it was their fault and whether or not a human driver could have prevented the accident in *any* car. That manufacturer now has to take responsibility for that car versus every idiot on the road, every pedestrian that runs out and everything that can confuse one of its sensors.
Autonomous driving *is* possible and quite easy - but we need autonomous roads to make it work, with nobody but the autonomous vehicles on it. Nobody, nowhere has actually built a real-life one of those on a real road that people would want to use because you have to use their vehicles to do it and you have to (indirectly) pay for that vehicle, that road, and any mistakes those vehicles make. And those roads don't and won't exist for decades if at all - or, more accurately, it's called the rail network. Automated rail networks are commonplace - London has the Dockland's Light Railway that has no drivers.
If you're going to have to build a road that only automated cars can use, and make some cars to use that road, you've effectively built a railway, or else you're putting billions of pounds of effort into avoiding obstacles and keeping to a strict lane when you could just make the thing run along a rail.
Why is there no call for an automated rail network? You can make it as fast as the super-express trains, it's very safe in comparison to any road, on established technology, you know it's not going to veer off the road, you can pack thousands of trains onto the rails if you do it right and take thousands of passengers in each etc. But instead, people honestly think that it's more sensible to put an automated system of even the best technology on an open road with other idiots and do this on a one-person, one-car basis (hence millions of units and billions of pounds) with complete freedom over how it moves the car, among other traffic that will stop it ever doing anything a human couldn't do? It's ridiculous.
Stop wasting your time and build a personalised rail network when I can get into a "pod" or something, enter my destination and it would take me there on good, solid, metal rails and a bit of signalling. And I don't have to worry that it thinks the man walking along the street with a cardboard cutout is actually a small child running in front of the car, or that it doesn't spot a police tape which has been strung across the road to close it because of a pedestrian parade further up the street.
An automated car has to have a human in it. It's the best call ever made on the introduction of a new technology so far. An automated car needs exclusive automated roads to every destination in order to work anywhere near effectively under autonomous control - that's called a railway and any more "transportation routes" being built just for automated cars is a fantasy world in a modern city. Automated cars have been shown to crash WHEN DEMONSTRATING how they were uncrashable. An automated railway already exists and works perfectly and has an excellent safety record. Use it.
answers.com says it took Polo four years to get to China -- even with getting stuck in Moscow traffic the vans win.