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Cooperative Cars Battle It Out In Holland
An anonymous reader writes "The first cooperative platooning competition, where vehicles use radio communication in addition to sensors, was held in Helmond, Holland a week ago. By using wireless communication the awareness range of each vehicle is extended, enabling vehicles to travel closer together which increases road capacity while at the same time avoiding the shockwave effects responsible for traffic jams. The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge distinguishes itself from earlier platooning demos (e.g. the PATH project) by having a completely heterogeneous mix of vehicles and systems built by multiple researcher and student teams. Using wireless communication to coordinate vehicles raises concerns about the safety of such systems, would you trust WiFi to drive your car?"
does that mean all the others have to follow?
Their they're doing there hair.
I would trust WiFi more than the tired trucker or the drunk driver in the other lane.
Everyday I travel by car, I feel this frustration that the car still needs me. Having to stop at traffic lights as the cars aren't synchronized and worrying that I might be distracted when the car in front of me brakes suddenly are only two of my gripes with driving the car myself.
How well do these cars cope with human-driven cars thrown in?
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In case of an accident with human drivers, most countries have relatively sane laws describing who should be held responsible. How do you solve that with automated cars?
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
If car-people had the slightest awareness of their environment then they might actually choose to live somewhere near to public transportation and then we wouldn't need automated road-trains like this.
But car-people are irrational and can only talk of their "freedom" to cause and sit in traffic jams.
Holland is a province in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is the country. Holland is also a city in Michigan.
Never go to Michigan.
How about this:
Humans are fallible, and hundreds die on the road every day. Would we accept a computer system that causes hundreds of people to die? Of course not. So any computer system that's considered capable of driving a car will almost certainly be safer than a human driver. Probably a thousand times safer.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Helmond is in North Brabant, not Holland. Both are provinces in The Netherlands.
TFA doesn't make it entirely clear but it seems like the radio network isn't critical to the cars safe driving. It supplies additional information that they can use to optimise their driving, but ultimately the car's own sensors take precedence in all safety related matters.
Of more concern than loss of signal is the potential for hacking. People have already demonstrated accessing a car's wireless sensors for things like tyre pressure on high end models. It is difficult to validate data coming from other vehicles.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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would you trust WiFi to drive your car?
Do I trust the drivers of the other cars?
Cars are these strange things that drive our minds crazy. I don't know how much is cultural (i.e. movies, etc.) and how much is psychological, but there are few areas in life where the disconnect between reality and subjective is so dramatic.
Everyone thinks he's an above-average driver. Of course, that's statistically impossible.
Almost everyone overestimates his (or her) ability to handle a car in unusual circumstances.
Very few people can correctly judge road and weather conditions and their impacts on things like brake distance.
Most people do not have a correct sense of speed anymore if they've driven at speed for a few hours.
and so on and so forth. Car accidents are within the top reasons of unnatural death in most western countries, but most of us feel more uneasy going on a rollercoaster (which cause what, a dozen or so deaths a year, world-wide?) or on a plane (around 1000 deaths per year, world-wide) than taking the car to work (1,200,000 deaths per year, world-wide). Yes, that's the real numbers, here and here are some sources, or google your own. Plane crashes fall way below the rounding error margin of car crashes.
Really, you would have to put really bad engineers with pre-historic computer equipment and unstable wiring into those cars to make them worse than human drivers.
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If car-people had the slightest awareness of their environment then they might actually choose to live somewhere near to public transportation and then we wouldn't need automated road-trains like this.
But car-people are irrational and can only talk of their "freedom" to cause and sit in traffic jams.
Agreed. If car-people were rational they would just follow the traffic regulations that exist in most places that say the left lane is for passing and traffic jams would be much reduced.
Traffic jams and too many accidents are caused by left lane hogs. Unfortunately, these people seem to believe the road is theirs alone as long as they do not exceed the speed limit. They classify any driver behind them as a "tailgater" who should be treated with contempt. They never stop to think that the ultimate cause of many accidents is the vehicles being too close together, and that situation is caused by a few people who drive slower than all other drivers and refuse to move to the right lane.
Would you trust a 15 year old WiFi with outdated software, on a poorly maintained vehicle?
It's called a train.
If the wi-fi fails, you just fall back to the data gathered by your own vehicle and drive more conservatively.
("you" in this case presumably being the program driving the car)
Link said cars up with a steel coupler. Might as well give em a different name then, like, aaaaahmm....... train!
it would be trivial for the last 30 minutes or so of 360 degree video recording + sensor data to be stored in a black box style device.
Analysis of this after any accident should give a clear enough picture of who is at fault
But hopefully not of the kind where all stop and sit around till the night shift system operator is roused...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Interesting. Of the 5 countries with the lowest rates (ignoring islands and very small states), 2 drive on the left and 1 has highways without speed limit.
The Wikipedia article references a William J. Beatty:
I've been doing this as routine behavior for almost 30 years now, after observing these "waves" and theorizing the causes. I've been setting an example how to stop the waves (if not the jams altogether)... not that anyone recognizes the point of what I'm doing. Can't explain it to them! They just think I'm trying to piss them off, being lazy or not paying attention.
That last is really why traffic jams occur, so taking the controls away from humans and giving it to machines that always pay attention, and thus know what to do and when to do it, is a good thing.
The problem is not that the WiFi might or might not be secure. The problem is that the basic premise of the system is to trust data send by random unknown cars. What happens if a malicious car sends false informations?
In my personal experience speed limits on highways make people that are too nervous and shouldn't be driving on them to begin with feel safer, and able to drive on them. My mother is a prime example of this. She either shouldn't have a license or should be restricted to roads with a speed limit of 60km/h or less. She's way too nervous and in a serious event simply can't react fast enough.
I had to save both our asses from rear-ending a dump truck that twisted off its u-joint and stopped abruptly as the drive shaft slammed into the ground. She was death gripping the wheel, I had to turn it and her for the car to veer into the other lane to avoid the collision. If she'd been in the car with someone else, or alone, that would have been an accident with one or multiple fatalities. The only thing that saved us then is that she was too scared to think of slamming on the brakes, which would have meant I wouldn't have been able to turn the car in time.
Its anecdotal I know, but at least 2 male and almost every female member with a few exceptions in my family are like this. Then they complain when other people don't follow the law to the letter etc. and it wasn't their fault. If you can safely avoid rear-ending someone when something goes wrong in their car or they don't follow the rules etc it should be your fault when you don't avoid it.
the woman in the Infiniti texting while driving in the left lane of the Mass Turnpike yesterday...
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would you trust wifi to drive your car
I believe there is an Audi concept car that does, if I remember correctly, by using google. The car gets data about weather conditions, not to mention road and traffic conditions from google. If your car veers into the opposite lane, the steering will be adjusted to bring you back to your lane. I believe it was a concept car, and was being test driven by Car and Driver or Motor trend, one of those magazines. I remember reading about the driver trying out that particular stunt, but not on a busy roadway, of course.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Gives a whole new meaning to 'war driving'...
Unable to RTFA (server not responding), but seriously? They _can't_ be talking about actually using 2.4GHz ISM band, _unlicensed_ spectrum, full of all kinds of crap that you have to accept, to build even a supplimental safety system. That's just the submitter putting a generic name to "wireless communication", right? *boggle*
So if youre on a long drive you can pull in the autopilot car only lane, set course and speed to 70ish turn on the mp3 player and catch some zzz's.
I have often thought it will only be a matter of time before our Cars would have access to other cars habits.
If enough cars were fitted with its own GPS systems, and these systems recorded its average movement, this information could then be shared to other cars with in its vicinity, share not only its average commuter information but the average commuter information that it has gathered for other cars around it too.
Basically a tether of info, ideal for rush hour traffic. The GPS systems can then take all this information, Current and historic, and help direct the best coarse of action for each driver on a per second basis.
I would trust WiFi more than the tired trucker or the drunk driver in the other lane.
Those people will still be there. Only you'll be shaving or whatever and your computer will never have a chance when they wander over into your lane.
Meanwhile I'll have noticed something is up with the car/truck next to me and have moved some distance away before there's ever a problem.
Computers are great but they simply cannot have as much context as you can scanning all over. And you know it will be a long, long time before it would ever be the case that all moving vehicles were required to be computer controlled - perhaps never as there will always be people opposed to the idea.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How long before we just have a rail to hang your car from for long distance travel in the US? Streets in the burbs and rural areas, walk / bike / subway etc. in densely populated areas, put your car on the rail to go to the next town. It would not eliminate the need for roads everywhere, but would reduce the need for big interstates everywhere. If fast enough could also reduce the need for air travel. Would of course require purpose built cars with necessary hardware, light weight, computer in dash to select and pay for destination, etc. ... Crazy?
You do know that taxis aren't available everywhere the roads go, aren't you?
Yes, believe it or not, ledow, there really is a world outside your metropolitan paradise.
Dan Aris
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There is an interesting video link illustrating the competition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmRifLzw8iA