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Robo Car
In the Hollywood film depiction of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report there is a scene where Tom Cruise is called into work in the year 2054. As he gets into his futuristic car we notice that he does not drive it. The car is automatically inserted into traffic and we learn that even though there are no drivers in the future there still are traffic jams to deal with.
The difficult thing to handle is not exactly the fact that in the future you don’t have to get behind the wheel, the hard part is getting used to driving sideways and in some cases not even using roads at all, which harkens back to another futuristic film Back to the Future where professor Brown returns in his time-traveling Delorean and tells young Marty McFly — that where they are going they don’t need roads.
Self-driving cars have captured the imagination of Hollywood for decades, but it could become a reality in the next five years.
This new technology is being spearheaded not only by automakers, but also Google. Earlier in December, the company announced that it has developed its first complete prototype of a driver-less car. According to the project’s director, Chris Urmson, the commercialization of such vehicles will begin around between 2017 and 2020. Google plans to participate in the upcoming Automotive News World Congress scheduled for January 13-15 to showcase the vehicle to prominent auto manufacturers.
Automakers, on the other hand, have also been working on developing their own autonomous driving systems. Tesla has worked with Google on the system but said that it was too expensive.
The electronic car marker’s D series of its iconic Model S vehicle features a semi-autonomous system. The company plans to launch its fully autonomous vehicle by 2023.
During an interview with Bloomberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk said that the company is targeting a driving experience “where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
Meanwhile, General Motors could start installing semi-autonomous driving feature, called super cruise, in its Cadillac by as early as 2016. Other automakers, such as Nissan’s Infiniti and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz have already been offering some forms of limited autonomous driving systems.
While car companies are trying to get the jump on driverless vehicles, city planners have already become aware of the future of public transportation which includes pilotless aircraft, remote controlled city train transit and driverless busses.
It is now being proposed that this type of travel will be preferred in the future because of traffic congestion and other problems that the driverless cars bring to the road.
Public transit consultants agree that driverless cars have a bright future ahead, but human transit is more practical especially on highly congested roads.
Luca Guala of transport think tank Mobility Think Lab writes in a letter the following:
Driverless cars very likely have a bright future, but cars they will always be. They may be able to go and park themselves out of harm’s way, they may be able to do more trips per day, but they will still need a 10 ft wide lane to move a flow of 3600 persons per hour. In fact, the advantage of robotic drivers in an extra-urban setting may be very interesting, but their advantages completely fade away in an urban street, where the frequent obstacles and interruptions will make robots provide a performance that will be equal, or worse than, that of a human driver, at least in terms of capacity and density.
Driverless buses, Guala argues, “are more efficient because they can carry more people than cars and eventually may be cheaper than the regular bus system because you don’t have to pay a driver.”
Another advantage of driverless buses over cars is that they follow set routes, so they are much easier to implement and run. The routes can be changed if needed. Navigation is less of an issue when compared to cars because buses use travel specific lines — they aren’t roaming all over the place. Alongside legal technicalities, this has traditionally been the biggest challenge to overcome if automated technology becomes synonymous on roads.
Based on its record, America leads the commercial airline industry in safety. And for most passengers, that information alone provides all the confidence in the world.
But there will always be nervous fliers who need to know: Who are they trusting with their lives, human or machine?
Today, in the quest for safety, many of us are unaware that airplanes largely fly themselves. Airline computers and electronic control systems allow pilots to fly “hands off” beginning soon after takeoff, continuing through the flight route and — in very rare cases — all the way through touchdown. However that does not mean that Pilots are not there to observe how things are going.
The future though is leaning towards shrinking the crew down to a few people.
Improved technology has contributed to shrinking cockpit staff. Before the Boeing 757 began service in the 1980s, most large airliners had a standard flight deck staff of three. They were the pilot, co-pilot and a flight engineer who managed pressurization, heating, fuel and pneumatic systems. When those systems became automated, the standard flight deck crew went from three to two.
Going from two to one pilot would be a difficult threshold for the airline community to cross.
Two onboard pilots allow for a safety net — and that is just about it. Eventually computers will replace the pilots.
Which begs the question, as the future unfolds would you ride on a plane that is pilotless? Would you ride in or own a car that does not need a driver, and would you trust public transportation if there was no one on board you paid your fare to?
Nobody thinks twice about riding an automated train.
There are three separate automatic train transit systems operating at McCarran International Airport near Las Vegas, Nevada.
The people mover system consists of three separate lines, one connecting the Main Terminal to the C Gate Concourse, another connecting the Main Terminal to the D Gate Concourse, and the third connecting the D Gate Concourse to Terminal 3, which opened in July 2012. There will be a fourth transit automated people mover that will be built which will be an extension of the Las Vegas Monorail, this will link Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 with central Las Vegas four miles away from the airport.
That is four miles on a train that will be under robot and computer control. Is that something you would trust to get you from the airport to your hotel on the strip?
I am sure many people who fear technology can think of many disadvantages to the new world of driverless transportation. Many people are very concerned when they realize that a computer has the responsibility of getting you safely to your destination and during that time you are placing your safety and well being into the hands of technology.
Also manufacturers of this technology are working with an all electronic system run by various software. Computers, software, satellite communication. All of the following can be hacked. When hackers get into this information there is no limit to what they can do with it. Track our travel destinations, time we spend out of our house, where our homes are and even worse be able to control our cars.
It has been demonstrated that electronic systems in your car now can be hacked, where things like acceleration, braking and steering can be controlled form an anonymous source.
Driverless cars could put the nation’s 232,300 taxi drivers and chauffer’s out of work. Then there’s the 647,500 bus drivers, 70% of whom work for school districts, they would be out of work too.
Just fewer than eight hundred and eighty thousand people would be laid off because of the new technology. According to the article “Google Cars Drive Themselves, In Traffic,” by John Markoff, Markoff explains how there are a bunch of legal issues that may erupt if robotic cars were legal.
Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all times, but what does that mean if the human is not really paying attention as the car crosses through, say, a school zone, figuring that the robot is driving more safely than he would?
In the event of an accident, you have to figure out who would be liable — would it be the person in the car or the maker of the software?”
These are serious consequences that the government must take into consideration. In the article by Markoff involving the Google Car, the only accident that did occur was that it was rear ended by a human driver.
Robotic cars won’t fully eliminate car accidents, but will reduce them significantly. If say in 2020, we do have robotic cars, it would be very difficult to have all vehicles be robotic unless there were to be a law passed.
Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk believes that cars you can control will eventually be outlawed in favor of ones that are controlled by robots. The simple explanation: Musk believes computers will do a much better job than us to the point where, statistically, humans would be a liability on roadways.
“I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
Even if that were to be the case, Musk cautioned what would be a slow sea change in the automotive industry, something that’s already been the case with hybrid and electric vehicles.
Today, Musk noted that the hardest part of helping cars drive themselves is what happens when vehicles are traveling between 15 and 50 miles per hour. “That’s where you get a lot of unexpected things,” Musk said. That list includes road closures, open manhole covers, children playing, and bicyclists.
There are lots of things that your robot car could run into without human remorse.
The conversion of the driverless cars could be daunting when one wonders if the autopilots of robotic cars wouldn’t be able to detect the unpredictability of human driving.
Down the road, eliminating the driver from vehicles could change the way land space is developed. Because people may be more willing to commute further to work, pushing out suburban sprawl. Considerable space is currently tied up for parking in cities could be freed up and used for development if cars could drop off their passenger and go park themselves further away.
Eliminating the human could cut down on drunk driving and careless mistakes, by replacing them with autonomous controls triggered by sensors that automatically brake if there’s a quick stop in front of the car.
To know if autonomous vehicles really are safer, or advantageous to society, or if it’s even feasible to pull this idea off on a large scale, we have to get the robot cars on the road to study their impact, which means people have to start buying and using them. Some form of government incentive, like with electric vehicles, are a possible solution.
Google claims that their driverless vehicles have gone 500.000 miles without a crash…however there was one fender bender when human driver behind the driverless car rear ended the vehicle.
As much as the thought of these vehicles sounds a bit difficult — reports and statistics look optimistic for a future with driverless vehicles.
Now it is up to the consumer to decide, and the lawmakers to provide the laws for these vehicles.
Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org
Source: http://www.groundzeromedia.org/robo-car/
