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China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: China will introduce the world's first driverless trains to run at speeds of up to 217 mph (350 km/h) on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway line. The automatic operation bullet trains were trialled on a section of the Beijing-Shenyang line in 2018 by the China Railway Corporation (CRC) and the system passed all safety tests. "The bullet train can automatically depart, operate between stations and adjust the train's operation to meet its precise timetable after a single button is pressed," a researcher from China Academy of Railway Sciences told the Sciences and Technology Daily. A driver currently performs these operations on high-speed trains.
For the first 10 years of the high-speed ATO trains, an attendant will still be deployed on board to ensure nothing goes wrong. After that, the trains will be totally driverless. Experts say this should improve safety long-term. "An automatic driving system could greatly improve the safety of trains which run on high-speed railways, compared with human drivers who may have sudden health problems or disregard safety precautions during driving," Sun Zhang, a railway expert and professor at Shanghai Tongji University, told the Global Times. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Line is currently being constructed for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, "to enable easy travel between Beijing and the Winter Olympic Village in 50 minutes," the report says.
For the first 10 years of the high-speed ATO trains, an attendant will still be deployed on board to ensure nothing goes wrong. After that, the trains will be totally driverless. Experts say this should improve safety long-term. "An automatic driving system could greatly improve the safety of trains which run on high-speed railways, compared with human drivers who may have sudden health problems or disregard safety precautions during driving," Sun Zhang, a railway expert and professor at Shanghai Tongji University, told the Global Times. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Line is currently being constructed for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, "to enable easy travel between Beijing and the Winter Olympic Village in 50 minutes," the report says.
When you're a train.
Great, I can't wait get into a crash and then have my (possibly dead, possibly alive) body be buried together with the train carriage a couple hours after. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8658959/Anger-in-China-as-bodies-fall-from-carriages-during-train-crash-clean-up.html
Fuck china.
350 km/h is a round number with two digits of precision, and if you're going to convert it to miles per hour, it'll become 220 mph, not 217 mph.
You're not supposed to add precision when doing unit conversions.
Is this overdose usage of technology..I hope they are not removing engine driver completely out of equations
As soon as the attendant gets the impression that he system just works, he will be doing something else than watching the system.
Watch Hulu for example https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
It is human nature.
What could possibly go wrong?
For those trying to off themselves.
Jump in front of it, no way in hell it will be able to stop and any short amount of distance.
Door obstruction = interlock. Buses have interlocks, trains usually have interlocks, amusement rides have interlocks, elevators have interlocks, therefore interlocks are not new. The doors are going to have maximum open times before they close so the train can continue. The train cannot depart until the obstruction is cleared. No interlock = certain injury or even fatality if the door obstruction is a person stuck in the doors or even just holding the doors open intentionally to make the train wait for a late passenger. An object blocking the doors is still a nuisance, whether it is something like luggage or a vandal decided to stall the train's progress, and it must be also cleared even if there is no imminent human safety risk (or the train departs with the doors in an opened state, partially closed is still open). Sensors still shut off at a critical point in the door close process with many automatic doors, and not all doors go into obstruction/reverse mode (some just stay stopped and blocked). Yes, the attendants can assist but then afterward when they do away with the attendants as a secondary measure... the passengers are on their own vs. the computer system if a door obstruction case occurs.
First it is a train : aka you don't steer anything apart speed plus all the TGV (French high speed trains) have automatic speed control using TVM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Voie-Machine ) on high speed line since a long time. This has been somehow superseeded by the European standard ERMTS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Management_System that also take benefit of the GSM Rail network on most European high speed lines (Germany, Spain ... and even UK !).
Plus at high speed, it takes kilometers for a train to stop. So even if you see an issue in front of you and stop right now, you will blast into it with your speed/inertia although beeing with full brake down. The thing in the middle of the rail road will be destroyed/dead and the nose of your train suffering serious damages that might require the whole train to go to maintenance. In such a perspective autonomous train are very different from autonomous car because it has so little level of liberty for its AI choices : speed up/down or brake.
FYI, the Alvia (Spanish high speed train) crash in Spain was mainly due to the lack of ERMTS speed control in the section in a curve at the exit of a high speed line. For cost reason, they have decided not to but ERMTS here. ERMTS would have limited the speed and prevent the train crash in the curb in the first hand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailment#Investigation
TVM & ERMTS directives are direct consequences intuited from train central routing systems state. The kind of consequences that triggers a shift of a train from a railway to another to avoir collision and ensure proper routing to destination.
What's the worst that could happen?
They'll likely get it done effectively too. Not that I think it's all THAT hard to do "self driving" when it's a train, but it can certainly adjust speed and such to accommodate realtime feedback.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Mr. Rogers had this solved in the 70s, with Trolley!
If a door has no interlock then you would want to stay clear of it?
How does this cope with routine accidents? Stray cow on the line. Fallen tree. Drunks putting a greenhouse or a cast iron park bench on the line. All things a locomotive engineer I know has complained about.
"The bullet train can automatically depart, operate between stations and adjust the train's operation to meet its precise timetable after a single button is pressed,"
In the meantime, it should be mentioned that the USA/Canada remain "stuck" in the 50s, operating diesel and electric trains that are not only filth & smelly, but are just inefficient to operate.
Further, the USA finds it prudent to spend borrowed cash to foment chaos in distant land and Canada simply follows its big neighbor to the south like a trailer. Sad!
of rails operating at 300 kph. It's a copy of the Japanese tech of course, but at a larger scale. It connects a large country in a way that most other countries don't enjoy. Domestic travel in China is fast and easy. People take these trains daily to go between company offices in cities far apart, engineers live in one city and work in another, one can easily visit remote places during a weekend, etc. I've experienced these benefits first-hand last few years in my visits to China.
Now watch all the silly jokes.
I remember when "self driving cars" were called "trains." Amazing how much easier the "self driving" problem is when the path of the vehicle is constrained.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
I remember a year ago when this happened:
https://www.insurancejournal.c...
"The train was traveling 78 miles (126 kilometers) an hour when it hit a curve near DuPont, Washington, where the speed limit was 30 miles an hour."
My first thought was "why in 2018 do engineers still drive trains?" Seriously. Why is there a human involved in constantly changing the speed of the train - which is literally a complete job description. Set the speed. That's it.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a human, and I think it's silly to remove humans from the equation simply because they're such a tiny cost and worth it.
Airplane manufacturers figured this out decades ago with autopilot. You have a pilot who does the hard stuff like taking off and landing, but for normal flying around at cruising altitude the plane flies itself. If the plane hits a rough patch or whatever the pilot will take over.
Driving a train in one dimension is much, much, (imagine about a thousand more "much"s) easier than flying a plane in three dimensions. Especially with GPS. It should be the case that a human drives the train one time on the route, his speed adjustments are noted 10 times a second or whatever, and then the computer simply does the same thing every time, setting the instantaneous speed based on location. Then, the human sits there and takes over if there's a person on the tracks or whatever.
Here's what I'm getting to. I'm literally baffled that this isn't normal. Seriously. How can someone even hit a cure at two and a half times the safe speed? This problem can be solved with hundred year old technology.
"NTSB investigators have said that an automated braking system known as Positive Train Control, which is required on railroads by the end of this year but wasn’t yet working on that section of track, would have prevented the accident."
Wow, you guys got right on that.
So, yeah, sorry to say I'm not real impressed with whatever China's doing there with "driverless train".
Do you have ESP?
Meanwhile in the USA, I can't think of one thing we are doing to improved our infrastructure. At best, we are doing some maintenance, but even that effort is inadequate.
An automated shuttle that runs between terminals in an airport, for example, is one thing. Should there ever be an accident, the most likely scenarios will not involve death, and probably not even life-threatening injury.
An automated high-speed train on the other hand, without on-board supervision, is a disaster waiting to happen. We are nowhere near having reliable enough high-speed trains to have them unmanned, even with dedicated rights-of-way. Someone needs to be on-board to make sure everything is operating correctly and deal with unforeseen circumstances.
This sort of project, happening in China, shows the substantially lower value placed on human life in China than in the West. Every time that I visit China, that idea is underscored again and again. The pithiest example was when the head of the Beijing First Military Hospital's neurosurgery department said to me (I develop brain implants): we don't have the technical skills to do here what you are doing in America, but I can offer you lots of patients to experiment with. My internal reaction was, "holy f**k, did he just say what I think he said?"
The Chinese don't care if a few hundred or thousand lives are lost in accomplishing a big project, or periodically during normal operations. They consider such costs an acceptable part of achieving long-term goals.
It's mainly German tech rather than Japanese. The trains, at least.
Seriously, that requires decent QA, and china is NOT where you go to find that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let us study this train for a few years.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Umm, a train doesn't need to drive itself other than to know when to start stop slow down accelerate. Rail switching hasn't been done by the train since the switches have been automated. Basically all stuff that could have been done with 90's tech. You dont even need GPS for this since the things are on fixed tracks. Just place signaling beacons along the line that indicate the train should slow for a curve or accelerate in a straight away. Markers where to stop at the station, and probably a go button for someone to press once the train is boarded and everyone is ready to go.
There is no point in putting an obstacle detection radar on a train moving this fast, There wont be enough time to slow the train by the time the radar picks up and identifies an animal or something in the tracks, better to just plow though, or setup perimeter fences around the tracks to mitigate wildlife or drunks in the tracks.
Not something that the USA can compete with; they don't even have high-speed rail yet, i.e. any passenger trains that go faster than 250kmph (160mph).
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
They realized the train driver is too smart to want to work in a Chinese train blowing down the tracks at over 200MPH.
When (not if) they crash will they be able to bulldoze themselves - and any survivors - into a ditch so senior officials don't lose face?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Modern positive train control (PTC) is installed, and in some places operational, others in testing. Installation Deadline is Dec 2018, and full operation will be in 2020. Effort will cover 54,000 route-miles vs 173.947 kilometers of double tracked high speed rail for the Beijing–Zhangjiakou intercity railway.