In any shared medium communications protocol...
collision avoidance is a must. For self-driving vehicles, this goes double.
New areas for standardisation that could aid with the development of new connected and autonomous vehicles will be identified by car manufacturers and telecoms companies in collaboration, industry bodies have said. According to a joint statement issued by groups representing companies in both the automotive and telecoms …
computer-aided driving will depend on "upgraded communication systems that provide higher performance levels in terms of latency, throughput and reliability of the network"
Really? So what will said self-driving car do when it ventures on to one of the many rural areas that is lucky to get GPRS on a good day? Or if, say, there is another GPS blip that takes out comms networks?
Self-driving cars need to be able to deal with other vehicles that are not on the network, due to faults or them still being driven by meat bags, so reliance on communications of any sort is a really dumb idea.
"So why do they keep telling us that reliable communication systems are essential?"
Efficiency for one. In a rural environment all you have to do is avoid a collision so minimal or no communication may work. In a city you want to be able pack the cars as close together as possible at as high a speed as is safe - to achieve this you may need direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication as well as centralized information on congestion and routing.
Do you really believe that the people working on self-driving cars have not realised this?
I'm sure they have, and I''m sure that somewhere in their design document there's a small footnote saying something like:
¹This presupposes the availability of 100% network coverage.
The actual implementation is, of course, somebody else's problem.
They may well have thought of it, and are probably well intentioned enough to actively try to avoid such issues even if there is a cost. Then again I'm sure Volvo really didn't intend their engines to sometimes switch off mid-journey: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/22/software_not_wetware_now_the_cause_of_lousy_volvo_drivers/
It is therefore not unreasonable to expect that even with the smartest people working on it (and lets not forget these are the people "letting down their government" by not inventing that magical back door in our encryption) something might just go wrong, whether that be unexpected loss of signal as Mr. Crawford supposes, or something like a manufacturer of less than high end cars connecting the ICE to the drive controls over a common bus to save a few pennies.
The more we get into "communications", the scarier it gets. I do understand the vehicles need GPS and probably some means of communication with a home base as such for re-routing if there's accidents, etc. Possibly a "back door" or some control if law enforcement needs to pull the car over... I hope it's not a back door but.....
However, that term in this day and age is probably not just stopping there. It will include such goodies as "entertainment" since if you don't have actually do anything except get in and tell the car where to go, there needs to be something for the meatbags to do. And this opens up the big things like advertisers and malware and bits of nastiness. I would hope that "security" isn't just footnote such as "Yes, this. We'll get around to it at some point.
Idiot-car? I have trouble seeing them most of the time. Worn to buggery, sunlight reflecting off them, hidden by surface water, burnt out and repainted somewhere else, different at every damn junction (Hertfordshire seem to have some weird mix of roundabouts that have lane spirals across the junction, completely unpainted junctions, different styles of lines forming the lanes going round and across... There's no consistency whatsoever!
Oh what fun.
The autonomous dinky Dagenham Dustbin behaving itself just the same as the boy racer's audi or beamer ....
Until said boy racer discovers the backstreet "rechipping" service that allows him to do - well - all of the &^$&($%??* things that beamer and audi drivers traditionally do*,
Other p**t driver brand names available.