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China Transportation Technology

China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH (independent.co.uk) 84

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
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.
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China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH More

China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH

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  • Self-driving is actually not that impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @08:17AM (#57908530)
    When you're a train.

    • Oh,good. Sometimes people call me a cab

    • Re:Self-driving is actually not that impressive (Score:4, Interesting)

      by quenda ( 644621 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @08:27AM (#57908544)

      Especially when they are connected full-time to remote operations centre, where they are monitored and controlled.

      What next? Self-driving elevators?

    • Self-driving is actually not that impressive When you're a train.

      It is when it changes lanes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Trains do not change lanes at high speeds. And at slow speeds it is not impressive, as what lane a train goes in is not under control of the train at all.

        • Trains do not change lanes at high speeds. And at slow speeds it is not impressive, as what lane a train goes in is not under control of the train at all.

          (well they're tracks anyway not lanes)

          Quite. Which is why the self driving train will look really impressive when it changes lanes.

          It's a joke, see. I thought calling them lanes (what self driving cars rive in and change) rather than tracks (what trains run on) was enough of a clue. If you turn the steering wheel*] on a train really hard and manage to cha

    • Re:Self-driving is actually not that impressive (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @09:01AM (#57908628)

      When you're a train.

      I saw ATO being demonstrated on the Tokyo subway system in the Seventies. Automatic operation of a high speed train, though, is a more difficult problem.

      Perhaps the next technology that China can borrow from theTokyo system will be linear induction.

      • Re:Self-driving is actually not that impressive (Score:5, Informative)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @11:06AM (#57908924) Homepage Journal

        The current high speed trains in Japan, doing 320 kph (limited due to noise), are actually very highly automated.

        At that speed the driver can't really see much. Signs and signals zip by so fast you can't read them, so they are all duplicated electronically in the cabin anyway. There are automated emergency systems too, which can apply brakes if the train is speeding or when there is an external problem like an earthquake or stopped train on the line. The trains run not much further than the minimum safe distance apart, largely governed by the reaction speed of the automated systems and the stopping distance of the train (a few kilometres).

        The drivers are also trained to act like robots in the event of an emergency, or really any anomaly. They are not allowed to use their initiative at all, they must look the problem up in a book and follow the instructions precisely.

        Even at the stations there is an automated system that helps the driver stop in precisely the right place. Everyone lines up by white markings on the platforms and the doors end up exactly opposite them, to within a few centimetres max. That makes boarding and disembarkation very efficient and non-terminal stops only need to be 30 seconds.

        You might wonder what the point of the drivers is then. Well, aside from reassuring the passengers, they do actually control the train (within the parameters allowed by the automation) and will make adjustments to keep it on time. If the train is 3 seconds behind they can accelerate a tiny bit harder or cruise 2 kph faster to make it up. But the main thing is that it means the automated systems don't have to be certified as absolutely fail-safe for fully driverless operation.

    • Says the person who has never driven a train at 350 km/h
    • Welcome to /. where half the people complain it's too easy and the other half complain it's too dangerous.

    • Yes, it is, but since the US cannot do it, let's jump on insult China bandwagon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      German ICEs are doing it from 160km/h upwards, because humans are too slow. Pretty old tech by now.

  • Basic numeracy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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/... [theverge.com]
    It is human nature.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      As these speeds, the attendant is worthless. All high-speed trains drive automatically at high speeds. This is not new.

  • Nice, but not huge innovation because ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05, 2019 @09:39AM (#57908724)

    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
  • Mr. Rogers had this solved in the 70s, with Trolley!

  • China on the roll for sure... (Score:3)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @10:13AM (#57908802)

    "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!

  • 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.

  • Okay, slow clap? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Saturday January 05, 2019 @10:48AM (#57908890) Homepage

    I remember a year ago when this happened:

    https://www.insurancejournal.c... [insurancejournal.com]

    "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".

    • Especially withOUT GPS.
      FTFY.

      A train on a one dimensional track as you called it correctly, always knows exactly where it is.

    • 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.

      Uh, you do realise that the vast majority of landings at all top tier airports are automated, and automated landing systems have been around since the 1960s?

      These days, a pilot can pick the taxiway they want to come off the runway

    • Look again. PTC in the US is here. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Modern positive train control (PTC) [aar.org] 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.

  • 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.

    • Well, every time a storm destroys a cable, may it be internet or power, it is a good opportunity to burry the replacement under ground ...

  • Seriously, that requires decent QA, and china is NOT where you go to find that.
  • Let us study this train for a few years.
  • 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).

  • 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?

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