London seeks trials of Google's robo-cars The Greater London Authority has approached Google to seek local trials of the company's autonomous cars. A Press Association report quotes Deputy mayor for transport Isabel Dedring as telling an unidentified event that her office approached Google to discuss trials and has spoken to the company half a dozen times over three …
Electric self drive would require nowhere near the ventilation or escape routes combustion engines do - the possibility of them organising as a group means that they could far more easily escape from a fire situation - no idiots leaning on their horns and refusing to reverse out of the way. You really wouldnt need much more than tunnels a bit larger than the 'standard' vehicle size over sub-Thames type distances.
Yes, let's build smaller tunnells accross London that electric vehicles can travel in. As the demand will be high, maybe then the seperate cars can be linked together to form a "train" that departs every minute or so for safety reasons. And your evacuation routes, spaced regularly along the tunnel could also be used as entrance points into the tunnel so that members of the public could use the "train" as well. What would the ideal tunnel shape be? May I suggest a roughly semicircular "tube" shape?
Seriously, I cannot wait until the cars are 100% autonomous. It's clear to me that us bloated meatsack drivers are the real problem, not road capacity.
Traffic is a behavioural problem first and a capacity problem last. Don't believe me? Easy observational experiment:
find a stretch of road with 2 or more lanes
watch how drivers will fight to occupy every lane, reducing the free road capacity immediately behind them to zero
Regardless of how slow or fast the lead cars are going, when either of the lead cars need to slow below the speed of the flow of traffic, every car behind a lead will start banking up because there is literally no room to go around the lead cars without reducing speed, which then reduces the speed of the car directly behind the lead, which reduces the speed of the car behind the car that's behind the lead...that effect will ripple back to every car in that lane who cannot move around the obstacle now in front of them.
Or watch drivers approaching a red light, they will move to pointlessly occupy any empty lane even though they themselves cannot proceed. A car now approaching that light, that would have otherwise been able to pass through without slowing down is now forced to stop. Which then causes the car behind them to stop, and the car behind that car to stop etc etc.
This is traffic, it's a human effect. Hundreds of self-important douchebags somehow thinking they're magically going to get to their destination that much quicker than the other douchebags by occupying an otherwise empty lane. You can expand those lanes to four, five lanes wide and the problem will persist even on a seemingly empty road.
(or is it just in my country this happens?)
And why would autonomous cars even need separated directional roadways? Or even lanes and traffic lights for that matter??? Those are features designed to help us dumb humans avoid colliding into one another.
Our networking software long ago nailed the algorithms needed to avoid collisions between computer controlled objects, surely it's just a matter of time before these new computer controlled vehicles make all our human road design completely obsolete?
This mayor has a ridiculously narrow mind. Even if traffic was still a problem after implementing 100% automated vehicles (I'd place a large bet it won't be), you're free to do whatever you want inside the cabin (wink wink) as you no longer need to divert all your attention to driving. sheesh, has this lady never even completed a crossword during a train commute before!
Can't happen soon enough for me. Fire ALL the meatsack drivers!!
end rant
The immediate advantage I'll see is all the heavy haulage/delivery/cargo drivers won't be needed anymore since autonomous cars don't have working hours. They can then choose to drive at night over long distances without breaks or at dawn so that it doesn't impact traffic. Then there's also the disappearance of cabs/taxis driving around empty looking for passengers - thankfully Uber has already started to put an end into this outdated business model - and will soon be replaced themselves with robo-taxis.
Obviously there's also the advantage you can have your own car drive you home if you're drunk... if only it could take your comatose body and put you in bed too.
As someone who is a) unable to drive on medical grounds (eyesight below the minimum for a license) and b) sick and tired of being scared half crapless by drivers not paying any attention, I can't wait for these things to replace meatsacks. The idea of being to go where I want without depending on public transport or paying through the nose for a kamikaze warrior in a minicab is something I can't resist.
If only. What is is with the human race and thinking computers and software are superior?
If everything is within expected parameters then yes, they can work well. It's just cars will be interacting with the same unpredictable humans when it comes to pedestrian crossings and bicycles.
Then you have the rather unpredictable nature of the roads. Potholes, obstacles in the road, emergency service vehicles etc. etc.
How will these cars cope with this?
"If only. What is is with the human race and thinking computers and software are superior?"
"The weather forecast is predicting unusually low temperatures which your car is not rated for. Would you like to purchase the software upgrade or stay home today?"
"The road ahead appears to have potholes. Would you like to purchase and install the pothole avoidance add-on or take a 35 mile detour?"
Then you have the rather unpredictable nature of the roads. Potholes, obstacles in the road, emergency service vehicles etc. etc.
And you also have the 'new' idea of removing the white lines and blurring the division between pedestrian space and vehicle space. Round my way currently the roads are covered in mud, so there is a blurring of what is road and what is field/ditch.
"Then you have the rather unpredictable nature of the roads. Potholes, obstacles in the road, emergency service vehicles etc. etc."
Most of that is very predictable. The first vehicle to encounter an obstacle/pothole will add it to the traffic database. All other vehicles can automatically maneuver or route around it. Pothole locations will be noted and vehicles will slow down before encountering them.
The problems you list could all be fixed by, instead of "firing" the meatsack drivers, *educating* them properly.
The current Driving Test is only just fit for purpose, it only says that someone has achieved the bare minimum skill level to be allowed out in control of a vehicle, yet for most people they pass and think "I know everything about how to drive" before forgetting most of it and acting like an idiot.
If people would just learn a bit of sense and consideration, road use would be a much more pleasant experience for everyone.
A lot of traffic congestion is itself caused by traffic congestion. Once something happens to interrupt traffic in a bottleneck it rapidly turns into a tailback even though the actual flow on the road is not that high. It just takes one driver who thinks it's clever to switch lanes without looking, and the resultant braking of everybody else eventually brings things to a halt behind them (while the idiot, of course, is unaffected.)
If you have autonomous cars interacting, this shouldn't happen. Speeds will automatically adjust to conditions.
Even more important, in urban areas, fewer people should want to own cars. That means less road obstructions. A lot of London roads would be absolutely fine but for on-street parking which reduces them to single track.
And then there's the reduction in people driving around looking for parking places - Bath at Christmas seems to consist of little else.
> If you have autonomous cars interacting, this shouldn't happen
Getting more people on two wheels (bicycle or motorbike) would also stop a lot of that happening. Traffic flow algorithms clearly demonstrate that, whilst two-wheel users may take up a similar amount of space in freely moving traffic as cars etc, as soon as congestion starts, they "disappear" because they are filtering through the gaps instead of taking up space.
Also two wheel users take up a lot less parking space too.
Unfortunately you get greedy councils like Westminster who decide that charging motorbikes for parking is a sensible move :-(
"Unfortunately you get greedy councils like Westminster who decide that charging motorbikes for parking is a sensible move :-("
Westminster is a parking company with a council attached - and autonomous motorbikes would be able to park elsewhere.
The interesting thing about all this is how councils - who are _not_ supposed to be profitiing from parking and enforcement revenue - are going to handle the plumetting of parking and enforecment revenue that theu're illegally(*) profiting from.
(*) I've been at council meetings where the justification for increasing parking charges (and eliminating 1/2 hour parking charges) was to make up for shortfalls in government funding. There was an uneasy silence when it was pointed out that making up funding shortfalls from parking was illegal, and the motion proposed by council staff was passed anyway. Within 12 months parking revenue had dropped 40% as drivers decided they could easily shop elsewhere and businesses started going to the wall as custom dropped off. The council's response? Raising business rates to make up the shortfall.
"A lot of London roads would be absolutely fine but for on-street parking which reduces them to single track."
Believe me, this is a good thing. Most of those roads are residential and the single track reduces traffic speed (noise) and traffic count (safety). Rat runners are generally distracted and dangerous.
is some idiots might insist on good old competitive approaches to the driving software rather than co-operative resource utilisation: you know people paying to access the emergency service service so they can fly down the 'outside' lane while waving fifty pound notes out the window having paid for the privilege.
Well, yes, but not in the way you think.
Effectively all lanes will become Zil Lanes, as we saw during the Olympics. The public sector just can't help itself - the view that they're all important (see Key Workers for reference) pervades and they'll insist on being able to leapfrog traffic queues.
When (and working in IT we know it WILL happen sometime) the autonomous system stuffs up, there will be a need to drive cars manually. Even if only for a small distance. Examples:
Some massive system problem shutting down the traffic management on which vehicles rely (for example all the traffic lights fail) Can't happen? I am sure that semi-national BT outage last week couldn't have happened either, and that's without the possibility of things like data/power cuts due to a digger taking out a comms/power line. If this happens then all those closely spaced (and now stationary) vehicles are not going to have much gap in between them for any independent emergency service vehicle to pass through.
The same applies with the smaller tunnels, even if the vehicles can be manually controlled, if there isn't room for them to move aside so the fire/rescue tender (not exactly small) can get down there with all the gear, at some stage people will be trapped in something and die. The same with the ambulances, they're not made wide simply to make driving them through traffic more difficult.
Also if you reduce and erode the skill base of approved "manual" drivers (and I don't refer here to gearboxes) regardless of what you think of the general population's skill, then you are going to reduce the pool from which you can recruit vehicle operators suitable to fall back on in an emergency. There's already a recruitment issue in the ambulance service in that younger drivers don't automatically get the C1 entitlement on their licences and have to take training and the test at their own expense prior to joining. This might get worse if everyone down to the utility company drivers were all totally dependent on things never going wrong with the IT system.
There's also a problem with autonomous vehicles that are unmanned. If I need to stop a driver to warn of a hazard around the corner, s/he will usually cooperate and not run into that collapsed person (for example) and may turn around and take another route if I explain I'm going to be resuscitating them for quite some time until an ambulance arrives. How do I explain that to a computer? Are they all going to have the AI of Lt. Data (ST TNG)? I think alas not.
I'm not opposed to the new tech but it needs to be capable of falling back with the resilience (such as it is) of current systems in terms of how in interacts with the world around it and the people (and possibly animals) inhabiting it.
" there will be a need to drive cars manually."
Or by remote control.
There's no rule which insists the driver NEEDS to be in the car, as long as the senors and cameras are working well enough to see what's around the vehicle.
"There's already a recruitment issue in the ambulance service in that younger drivers don't automatically get the C1 entitlement on their licences"
Which is sensible and a bloody good thing. Being old enough to have a C1 automatically doesn't make one _COMPETENT_ to have it, (I have tractor qualifications on my licence, but I've never driven one)
" and have to take training and the test at their own expense prior to joining."
Which is stupid and a symptom of employers who refuse to train properly. The "just desserts" for this selfishness is that qualified drivers become harder to recruit and _signifcantly_ more expensive to hire/retain. (See southeastern ambulance service attempting to save money by delaying callouts, leading to several deaths and the CEO who set this policy merely being sacked with a large payout instead of imprisoned for manslaughter)
Given how this world runs, if self-driving cars become abundant there will be a class system. There will be 'premium accounts' and upgrades and so on.
Premium account holders will be routed with priority around the traffic jams the plebs are in. A number of roads will only be accessible to premium account holders, for example the roads leading to their homes in the gated communities. All other cars will be routed around. And so on. After all, money must have it's privileges, doesn't it?
Just to rain on the "bad eyesight" and the "had a few beers" squad: It ain't gonna be like that. The driverless cars (at least for anothe 20-30 years) will require a licenced driver fully capable and able to control the vehicle at all times when needed.
13 year old in driverless car solo on the school run?
6 pissed hen-night birds in an auto-limo?.
Stephen Hawking on the way to a lecture in his Google- roadster?
Stevie Wonder on the way to a gig?
Nope, nopety nope.
And if this is all out of the question, then why at all?
Just my opinion, don't listen to me.
20-30 years? From the time driverless cars get the green light (pun intended) it will be 5 years max until the requirement for a licensed human back-up driver is removed.
So that's 15~25 years of R&D, production engineering, changes to the road infrastructure to support driver less cars, some (limited) usage of driverless cars etc. Given the history of other changes such as the introduction of unlead petrol, seat belts, catalytic convertors, to name a few, the 20~30 years figure doesn't seem so unrealistic.
But yes there are people in the road safety business who are wanting things to happen sooner as with an aging population, we are going to have a rather large population who we don't really want on the roads, but for whom we have no real alternative but to let them 'drive'. Also they see driverless cars as a way of taking away someone's license without it necessarily costing them their employment prospects...
" From the time driverless cars get the green light (pun intended) it will be 5 years max until the requirement for a licensed human back-up driver is removed."
And about the same amount of time that the licensing bar will be _significantly_ raised for new drivers, plus about the same again that existing drivers will face mandatory retesting when it's obvious that most crashes (not accidents, those are what a 3 year old does in his pants) are caused by humans and made worse by humans.
The danger period for automated vehicles is caused by them being surrounded by irrational monkeys controlling heavy machinery, not by the robots.
The driverless cars (at least for anothe 20-30 years) will require a licenced driver fully capable and able to control the vehicle at all times when needed.
Nope. Google has already managed to persuade the US government that the computer can be classified as the car's driver: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/09/google-computers-self-driving-cars-human
You are "driving" a Auto-Car with wife and 2 kids inside.
Lorry careers out of control in front of you. Hitting it will result in death of all inside.
The only escape route is to swerve into a line of pedestrians and potentially kill several of them.
Human nature is self preservation, you will almost certainly swerve.
What is the cars choice? Kill the passengers, or kill the pedestrians?
Is there going to be threshold of importance? Does it matter if the car contains the UK Prime Minister and the US president on a jolly with the Queen and the line is a bunch of geriatrics? What if the car contains one 20 something male and the queue is a line of kids?
These things have to be programmed.
Discuss.
There is someone currently on trial over this.
One driver overtook another in the face of oncoming traffic. The driver of the car coming the other way had to decide who to hit. She decided to hit the overtaking car, not the car being overtaken. Three people were killed. The driver of the "innocent" car went off the road and all 4 people on board survived. If the Jeep coming the other way had hit the Peugeot 206, perhaps the death toll would have been higher. We do not know.
The person I feel sorry for is the woman who had to make the decision. I don't think anybody, even a professor of ethics, could have made an "optimal" decision in the time available. We cannot expect an electronic system to do better than the best human system in such circumstances, otherwise we set an impossible bar; to expect an electronic system to resolve an ethical issue that human beings could not agree on.
The electronic system cannot possibly know the outcome. The woman driver did not know that she would survive.
Possibly the best we can do is to insist that the electronic system obeys the law regardless of consequences, a bit related to the old tag fiat justicia, ruit coelum. That means it is going to brake as hard as possible while staying on the road, unless there is a clear way out.
I keep seeing these hypothetical scenarios (which tend to get more and more outlandish with stupid setups about train tracks with ten people on one side of the points and only one on the other) and my observation is "which idiot designed this system where such a thing could happen in the first place"?
I know someone who is a Police Motorcyclist and he comments about the number of times he's taken an accident report where someone says "suddenly" or "unexpectedly" or "out of the blue", which actually translates as "I wasn't paying enough attention".
Self-driving cars have 360 degree attention, so nothing short of an explosion will "surprise" them.
When you learn Advanced Driving or Riding, you learn about Riding/ Driving Plans where you are constantly evaluating everything that's going on around you and thinking "if that lorry suddenly swerves, where would I go?" or "If the car behind the one coming in the opposite direction starts to pull out, can I brake in time or, at least, sound my horn and flash my lights to make them aware of my presence so they back out?"
Sure, sometimes you will meet a suicidal or drunken idiot or that lorry's tyre will blow out and spread flying rubber all over the road, but there are so many of these scenarios which can be dealt with without needing to decide "who dies?"
But you're missing the point.
It HAS to be programmed.
Your brain has self preservation pre-programmed and I'm sorry I've seen a car have a high speed blowout and flip the central reservation and cause the other side to take instantaneous action.
What about black ice? Have automated cars somehow manged not to slide on ice?
You're missing my point: You're offering a False Dilemma where it's "either kill X or Y", I'm pointing out that most of the scenarios that claim such things are actually avoidable in the first place.
As for black ice, it's not difficult to have sensors measuring the temperature and slipperiness of the road surface and share that data with other vehicles, not to mention being able to independently control the power/ braking of each wheel to avoid loss of control.
"It HAS to be programmed."
No it doesn't. The car like a human driver does not know everything. So the decision will not be a choice of how many are injured but more likely how to achieve the lowest velocity impact while staying on the road.
I think most of the technical development effort and computing resources will be devoted to avoiding situations where there is no safe way out.
I think most of the technical development effort and computing resources will be devoted to avoiding situations where there is no safe way out.
Eddie: "There seems to be something jamming my guidance systems. Impact minus 45 seconds. Call me Eddie if it'll help you relax."
Arthur: "Computer! DO SOMETHING!!"
Eddie: "Sure thing, fellah. Handing over manual control. Good luck!"
The effort will go into ensuring the voice used by the computer strikes just exactly the right tone, emotion etc...
"The car like a human driver does not know everything"
It doesn't need to. The simple fact is that most drivers are barely competent to point a car vaguely in the direction they want to go and can't cope with anything unexpected.
A robot pays 100% attention 100% of the time and reacts within milliseconds to changes, vs hundred of ms for humans. It also doesn't enter "stunned mullet" mode when faced with impending doom like so many humans do, which is the prime cause of failure to avoid an oncoming hazard - many humans don't even brake. On top of that it _won't_ get impatient and attempt a dangerous overtaking manouvere _OR_ drive at 30mph on the open road like so many geriatric drivers do, leading to a long line of fuming drivers banking up behind them and the inevitable overtaking attempts.
With regard to blowouts, etc - tyres actually give plenty of warning before failure(*) and the reason they happen on the road is because drivers ignore them. Again, a robot won't ignore the warnings, so there won't be many "sudden catastrophic failures"
(*) One example I can think of is a truck I was following on single carriageway whose trailer tyre was clearly deflating and out of round for over 10 miles before it finally flew apart and flipped the trailer. The driver admitted he knew something was wrong but pressed on regardless. A robot would detect the early warning signs and put in for repairs before this happened.
...are what is needed to stop the traffic chaos that rules most civilized countries nowadays.
I feel stupid every time that I have to drive to work in a traffic jam, to get to the office and sit in front of a computer for 8 hours to do things that don't require help from anything or anyone in my office building, and I know that it works perfect, because I had to stay home for 6 months after a leg fracture that made it difficult for me to commute to work (BTW, i broke my leg at work!), so I did all my work from home, I can bet that I was even more productive than I'm in the office, because nobody is distracting me with non-work related gibberish.
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