Slashdot Mirror
Autonomous Road Train Project Completes First Public Road Test
theodp writes "Covered earlier on Slashdot, but lost in the buzz over the Google driverless car is Project Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), Europe's experiment with 'vehicle platooning,' which has successfully completed a 125 mile road test on a busy Spain motorway. Three Volvos drove themselves by automatically following a truck in the presence of other, normal road users. The Register reports that on-board cameras, radar and laser tracking allow each vehicle to monitor the one in front, and wirelessly streamed data from the lead vehicle tells each car when to accelerate, break and turn."
With mechanical linkages and a track instead of this complicated virtual 'pretend' train
On long mountain roads far to often I see someone try to aggressively pass long sets of cars only to have to abort half way, causing other drivers to let them in quickly to avoid an accident..
I wonder if this road train would let them in.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Seriously, how easy was that one? Brake is something that slows down a vehicle. Break is when it fails to Brake!
You could have taken say, 3 seconds, and done something better, like...
They were driving on the highway, and discovered there was no exit.
I can't see the point in pursuing automated drivers. I mean, even if you could get them to work well 99% of the time, that 1% failure (or even .001% failure) would be just unacceptable.
I know we get computers to control aircraft, but it is a rather different situation. The problem of controlling an aeroplane with nothing up there to run into is a problem 10000 times easier than on the ground where there are so many hazards to avoid. The software would be so complex, there would be no way of knowing when it is going to plunge the vehicle into a tree. Odd happenings like this even occasionally happen to aircraft, but at least then the pilot usually has time to recover the situation before it is fatal. And that software is going to be MUCH simpler and auditable.
Not quite where I thought you were going with this...
"Breaker one-nine. Looks like we got us a convoy."
-- Alastair
I worked on Carnegie Mellon's Red Team racing for a bit, but I didn't do anything major. I wanted to put in a redundant vision detection to their laser range finding and GPS guidance, but I got shot down. At least they let me poke around with GPS tweaking for a bit.
Anyway I always thought it'd be much easier to just make a train system where the rerouting sections get switched depending on your trip you programmed in. By being off normal rider roads, you'd only have to contend with other computerized trains, which could be tracked. The key thing at this point is just having some way to avoid deer and downed trees. I would think by first getting an automated train system up, then we could move into car systems later. The real trick is finding a city that doesn't have car transportation that wants to risk itself into automated trains. There are other problems with automated trains such as vandalism and terrorism and such.
God spoke to me
So the options are: (a) break the train --- but this is bad, because you're suddenly going to have to alert everybody from the break downstream that they're suddenly going to have to drive on manual, without much warning, or (b) maintain the train, but with a foreign car in the middle.
In either case, the cars in the train should identify the vehicle and notify the authorities. It would also help to update the traffic law to make it only legal to join a road train from the back with an approved autonomous tracking system. Anything else results in an expensive fine and a moving violation on the driver's record.
Who else read "Anonymous Road Train Project"?
Picturing guys in business suits with Guy Fawkes masks on.
Reminds me of the demotivator I threw together the other day.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Oh yeah? How are you getting the cars in behind to drive themselves?
In Australia, a "road train" is a transport truck with multiple physically coupled trailers, not a convoy of independent vehicles. It's like a train - but on the road. Hence, the name: road train.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Most of the time highway traffic is safe and predictable. Driving 125 miles under favorable conditions (perfect weather and visibility if the news photo is any guide) without incident? Drunks do that and often get away with it; so do texting teenagers and fatigued truck drivers.
If someone demonstrated that he could drive 125 while smoking marijuana without having an accident, would we conclude that driving while high is safe and should be allowed?
The accident rate on highways is so low that 125 miles tells you nothing at all. The average accident rate in the United States is 8 fatalities per billion passenger miles. There is no way in the world a single 125 mile test involving four vehicles can tell you whether the accident rate for these car-trains is the same, ten times as high, or ten times as low. This is just a stunt, and proves nothing except that someone at Volvo had guts, and that someone in authority exercised bad judgement and allowed it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Will this make them more exciting or less exciting. In the movies?