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A Platoon Of Networked Self-Driving Trucks Will Be Tested in the UK (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes the AP:
Britain is set to conduct road trials of self-driving trucks, involving a "platoon" of vehicles controlled by a driver in the front. The Department for Transport said Friday that up to three trucks will travel in convoy, connected by Wi-Fi and with braking and acceleration controlled by the lead vehicle. Officials say the formation saves fuel and reduces carbon emissions, because the lead truck pushes air out of the way, making the others more efficient.
Call me a luddite, but why make this legal while there is still a ban on any vehicle having more than one trailer. Surely a multitrailer lorry-train with physical wires and wireless backup would offer all the same advantages, but be much safer and easier to manage? Not to mention less hackable.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
There is an accompanying study that says that a global deployment of such platoons may decrease the temperature increase by 4.27% over the next fifty years.
How these things work out the follow trucks get stuck at a red light or even behind just a slower vehicle? Are those things even possible? Do they start and stop from depots along the highway and have big flashing lights and warnings not to get in between them?
What happens if the wifi signal is lost? Are the trucks smart enough to pull over and stop? What if there is no shoulder?
Article is very short, no pictures or technical details.
self-driving trucks ... controlled by a driver
So, it's little more than a road train, only with each wagon having an engine, and guided by virtual, rather than physical linkage?
Wifi jammer
Car
Truck loot
Profit
Ever seen the roads mangled and road tar deformed where heavy buses stop all the time?
One truck wheel pushes down, and surface elasticity has time to push it back up.
Now in a close convoy the next wheel crushes that spot again - this is what happens when whackers and steamrollers compress road base. Even concrete roads are not immune to heavy damage. Nobody has consulted a road repair boffin.
All they see are safety issues. Road repair bills will skyrocket. Results will vary, but on superwet days, or hot/ freezing days, the avalanche of heavy tires will punish the roads.
That fact needs to be added to the model.
In addition to the fuel savings, you also save having a driver in 2 of the 3 trucks.
Got this python script to deauth the neighbors when they set their channel to the same as the restaurant with free wifi that should work pretty well for this "platoon".
Oh, and a platoon is like 25-30 so this is more like a fire-team of trucks.
That'll be interesting in court after an accident.
You know, if you push this idea to its logical conclusion, you end up with a train. And we already have those. Plus, since friction of metal wheels on metal rails is a lot less than friction of rubber pneumatic tires on asphalt, the train is even more energy efficient.
I can understand the desire to reduce loading/unloading times by transporting goods by trucks which can all split up to different delivery addresses when they reach their destination city. But you have to remember that a long convoy of trucks imposes an externalized cost onto other cars on the highway. They have to wait for the convoy to pass before they can get into that lane so they can exit, or incur additional risk of injury or death by speeding up to try to get in front of the convoy. If you really have enough stuff going to the same city that you need multiple trucks to carry everything, just put it onto a train and transfer it to trucks at the destination city.
I mean, in the end, this becomes something very similar to a road train (a tractor with multiple trailers). There are all sorts of disadvantages to a road train, mainly maneuverability and braking. Still, it seems that rather than get the minor fuel improvement of running three tractors tight on each other, it would be far less complicated--and probably more reliable and safer--to create road trains where each trailer has greater independence from each other. Things like independent steering and the ability to brake harder and somewhat independent of each section ahead of them. All you really need for that is an intelligently designed, and semi-intelligence, set of front wheels for each subsequent trailer, and they can be wired together with Wifi as backup.
Cheaper to produce, and much cheaper to run down the road.
at least the out of work drivers have NHS unlike the USA
Couldn't they at least come up with their own encrypted standard? What's going to happen when someone is in WiFi range of one of these things and decides to play with a ESP8266 running esp8266 deauther https://github.com/spacehuhn/esp8266_deauther
I don't get how this is any safer than the existing tractor trailer trains you see on the road today, where it is common to see two even sometimes 3 tractor trailers hitched together for long hauls.
https://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/2017/04/13/accident-free-driving/
Good.
Go UK.
Unlike platoons, convoys operate across multiple lanes with no designated leader
A platoon consisting usually between 40 and 50 units, calling 'up to 3' units a 'platoon' seems to be a stretch to me, but perhaps UK platoons are just threesomes.
.. they get split up, or if people are trying to merge or they miss a turn because a car is in the way or a traffic light on the entry/exit off-ramp splits them due to unfavourable timing?
It sounds like they'll be tail-gating each other since it talks about aerodynamic fuel saving; That is illegal in this country for safety reasons.
If they are not tail gating each other, how will they respond to cars and such moving into the gap between them?
When I'm in convoy with another driver, I find unless I dangerously actively block drivers from merging between us, I cannot always stay directly behind them and may sometimes end up with a couple cars between us, often requiring an overtaking manoeuvre to get back behind them or for the lead car to pull over to wait for me to catch up due to e.g. traffic lights splitting us.
How is this convoy to deal with all that sort of thing?
And so with small fanfare and a queer simulacrum of hope began mankind's autogenocide.
About time. Sick of some greedy trucker assholes working too many hours, falling asleep at the wheel, and killing everyone.
We built this "platoon" on a system which runs on dedicated pieces of iron and we tied together the cargo platform surfaces on wheels.
It's called "train".
...trying to negotiate it's way past that wee Honda Jazz doing 40mph in the middle lane.