Vans Drive Themselves Across the World 157
bossanovalithium writes "Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 13,000-kilometer test drive from Italy to China which mirrored the journey carried out by Marco Polo in the Middle Ages. The four vans, packed with navigation gear and other computer software, drove themselves across eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert without getting lost. They had been equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles."
Frist Thumbs-up! (Score:3, Insightful)
At one point, a van stopped to pick up hitchhikers.
Not more "safety features" please (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather than replacing drivers it is hoped that the technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers' abilities
That's become the problem with ABS, traction control, airbags and many other safety features: make drivers feel like they're safer, they will drive more like idiots. I'd far rather this system was developed to replace drivers; granted it will take more work to make it completely reliable, but it would mean fewer people thinking that because they've got the latest safety systems in their car they don't have to pay as much attention to their driving.
Autonomous vehicles (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with autonomous vehicles is not what they can do successfully, it's what happens when they fail.
If I don't press my brakes in time to prevent an accident, I risk going to jail for dangerous / careless driving.
If the autonomous van doesn't... well... what? We can take the human "driver" off the road, sure, but that's not fixed the problem. So the second one person has an accident in an autonomous vehicle, you're looking at major liability and lawsuits directed towards the car manufacturer - whether or not it was their fault and whether or not a human driver could have prevented the accident in *any* car. That manufacturer now has to take responsibility for that car versus every idiot on the road, every pedestrian that runs out and everything that can confuse one of its sensors.
Autonomous driving *is* possible and quite easy - but we need autonomous roads to make it work, with nobody but the autonomous vehicles on it. Nobody, nowhere has actually built a real-life one of those on a real road that people would want to use because you have to use their vehicles to do it and you have to (indirectly) pay for that vehicle, that road, and any mistakes those vehicles make. And those roads don't and won't exist for decades if at all - or, more accurately, it's called the rail network. Automated rail networks are commonplace - London has the Dockland's Light Railway that has no drivers.
If you're going to have to build a road that only automated cars can use, and make some cars to use that road, you've effectively built a railway, or else you're putting billions of pounds of effort into avoiding obstacles and keeping to a strict lane when you could just make the thing run along a rail.
Why is there no call for an automated rail network? You can make it as fast as the super-express trains, it's very safe in comparison to any road, on established technology, you know it's not going to veer off the road, you can pack thousands of trains onto the rails if you do it right and take thousands of passengers in each etc. But instead, people honestly think that it's more sensible to put an automated system of even the best technology on an open road with other idiots and do this on a one-person, one-car basis (hence millions of units and billions of pounds) with complete freedom over how it moves the car, among other traffic that will stop it ever doing anything a human couldn't do? It's ridiculous.
Stop wasting your time and build a personalised rail network when I can get into a "pod" or something, enter my destination and it would take me there on good, solid, metal rails and a bit of signalling. And I don't have to worry that it thinks the man walking along the street with a cardboard cutout is actually a small child running in front of the car, or that it doesn't spot a police tape which has been strung across the road to close it because of a pedestrian parade further up the street.
An automated car has to have a human in it. It's the best call ever made on the introduction of a new technology so far. An automated car needs exclusive automated roads to every destination in order to work anywhere near effectively under autonomous control - that's called a railway and any more "transportation routes" being built just for automated cars is a fantasy world in a modern city. Automated cars have been shown to crash WHEN DEMONSTRATING how they were uncrashable. An automated railway already exists and works perfectly and has an excellent safety record. Use it.
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:5, Insightful)
That's become the problem with ABS, traction control, airbags and many other safety features: make drivers feel like they're safer, they will drive more like idiots.
Never mind the fact that traffic deaths (in the US at least) have been decreased INCREDIBLY with the aforementioned technologies. Some do choose to drive like increasingly effective idiots, but not nearly enough to outweigh the safety benefits. I will go with the safety technology versus the notion that the sword of Damocles is effective at preventing accidents, thank you very much.
Re:Autonomous vehicles (Score:1, Insightful)
There is a key difference between a highway for autonomous cars and an automated rail system. Namely, the last mile: you can get off of an autonomous highway and start driving your car on public roads (manually, even) but you can't do the same with a rail system. I don't think anyone is, at this time, floating a proposal for autonomous cars that MUST drive themselves.
The technology for autonomous driving is also the same for autonomous alerting - i.e. "let me drive, but tell me if I'm doing something wrong."
Re:Autonomous vehicles (Score:3, Insightful)
A car needs a semi-drivable asphalt / gravel / dirt road to drive on. There's endless miles of them that it wuold cost trillions to replace and billions to maintain per year. The vast, vast majority of people want a drive that takes them to the doorstep and ends in their driveway, not some railway station far off from which you need to carry all your belongings and goods. Most of those that can comfortably do without already take the bus / tram / metro / railway.
And even if you happened to be on the network, it still wouldn't replace the car unless all yours friends and family and shops and everything else you'd like to visit was on the network too. I don't have a car and as a result I need to have a taxi budget, if I needed it regularly I would without a doubt buy a car and an automated car system like you describe would be no substitute at all, exactly because all the odd places wouldn't be covered.
An automated driving system would have a huge advantage in that we could have it record all the video and sensor input to a black box that'd survive the crash meaning no more word against word. I would think as all the crap drivers got exposed through video recordings, the death and injury tolls and the insurance costs started dropping people would accept that it is not perfect but substantially better and can be continously improved unlike the average driver who is pretty much the way it is. If the US wants to be all legally retarded then it'll happen in Europe or some other area and eventually the US would get dragged along.
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:3, Insightful)
A human still has to program the sucker.
And I would much rather have a human I could watch and monitor than an AI concealed in an opaque chip that I would just have to trust implicitly.
I barely trust people as it is even when I can watch them.
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think we'll ever have completely automated cars. Even if they reduced accidents by 80%.
People will see a big difference between getting in an accident by human error or by a malfunctioning computer.
The fact that it's completely up to the computer will make it feel like playing a slot machine. Sure there are times when human error by someone else is completely out of your control, but I think people will perceive it differently.
Re:Autonomous vehicles (Score:3, Insightful)
As was the case with elevators for a long time...even when not strictly needed.
Re:Very cool, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
... as cool as it sounds, the vans were mostly designed to form a "virtual train" after a human-driven vehicle, so it's not quite autonomous navigation just yet.
I figure the first practical use for autonomous vehicles will be articulated lorries / semi-trailer trucks on the motorway / freeway. They tend to form virtual trains anyway. If they can talk to each other, you could get them just inches apart (with synchronized braking, etc.), which I imagine would offer opportunities for much improved aerodynamics.
Re:Very cool, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Liability is one of the things I worry about with any kind of autonomous road vehicle. The first time one of these automated "road trains" shreds through a family's sedan I expect there will be fighting between the trucking company and whoever developed the automated driving system to decide who is financially liable for it.
Re:Not more "safety features" please (Score:3, Insightful)
True. But how many humans could actually do that when pressed? Not all of them, that's for sure. Yet they are still allowed to drive as much as they want, since they are willing to take the risk or avoid the situation. The same could be true of an AI. It could simply refuse to drive on what it knew to be prohibitively dangerous icy mountain passes. Or your perfectly cognizant human would recognize the situation and take over from the AI, which prior to this had done a perfect job of avoiding walls, cliffs, and skidding.
Sure, there is infinite room for improvement of AI, but that is hardly a reason to oppose its adoption as long as we understand its limitations.