A trucker trying to hack the haulage industry [video]
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It's the loading docks, the fueling stations, the truck scales and all the rest of the infrastructure that supports trucking.
All of those are going to need to have "automated truck" support as well, not to mention, when an 18 wheeler blows out a tire, you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop, but even more skills and equipment to effect the repair.
Mining operations are easier because they work on their own property and aren't required to mix with other passenger vehicles.
I know you said "eventually," but I suspect that it's going to take at least 50 years before we're anywhere even close.
you need some skills to bring the truck to a successful stop
You bring up good difficulties. Still-- most of those problems have solutions and I sure hope it's sooner than 50 years from now we see self-driving long-haul trucks on the road.
These are decent examples, but don't most of them only account for the safeyy of the controlled vehicle itself? I mean, it's impressive that a quad copter can land itself after a partial failure, but can it do it over a crowded city? With a hazardous load? Can the control software understand NFPA 704 of it's own cargo, plus the cargo of other vehicles near it and make appropriate decisions? All of this possibly near the maximum weight ratings for it's transportation type?
I'm _all_ for automation, and I think it's the next most logical direction of our society; however, I think people tend to underestimate the totality of challenges involved especially for cargo transport.
An automated truck won't need a conventional cab. It could essentially be a powered sled that rigidly attaches to a trailer with much less forward projection. This would be easier to control in emergency stops.
What I mean by that is if the most cost effective big rig truck gets say 10MPG then that cost gets built into the market rate. If a new truck design gets 15MPG and costs more you can figure out the costs vs what's out on the market and see if it's an improvement.
As to self-driving trucks, sure there are downsides. But, I suspect the net efficiency gains can offset them in most situations. Once most shipping companies switch the downsides will just be 'industry overhead' until their dealt with.
I see your point, but that's a particularly poor example. Most shippers will pass the fuel costs as a "fuel surcharge" on to the customer. If you're an owner/operator, this is the most lucrative part of the business, and is really the whole reason to be an O&O in the first place. Trucking is just a really strange business.
http://yrc.com/fuel-surcharge-us/ Note there updating there numbers on a weekly basis and they have nothing to do with the actual costs.
Do they?
The trucks don't need to automate 100% of tasks for initial implementation, the first ones will be driverless in-between cities (or driver-nap in-between cities) with manned fueling, loading docks, scales, etc.
This will require some changes, but I don't think it will be too much of an issue to move toward full-serve gasoline service in the interim.
If you want them to be economically competitive, then yes.
The largest current expense is the driver salary, mostly due to the low quality of the working conditions and extended stays away from your "home." If you're still carting people around in the truck, then you will have a difficult time competing with large personnel and technology expenses.
What I'm trying to suggest is that a fully automated nation-wide delivery service is going to be exceptionally difficult and will take a long time.
This is mostly from the perspective of OTR/long-haul transportation. You'll likely see faster adoption on smaller scales such as in-city delivery services like grocery delivery and the like. It will blossom outward from there but it's still going to be a very long process.
The response would be to have people fixed at these scales/fuel stops/docks that handle what the driver would have been doing.
Loading and unloading the vehicle at docks will adjust to meet a happy medium. As you already mentioned the single biggest expense is the driver, eliminating that is key, everything else will adjust accordingly.
What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph?
For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?
Try diagnosing someone suddenly getting pissed off and cutting off another driver which sets off a chain reaction of the events leading up to a multi-vehicle collision. The driver may attempt to cover-up, deny or lie about what happened to protect themselves whereas the software would not have such self-preservation and would report things as they occurred without being concerned with assigning blame or establishing guilt.
Software is not going to turn its head and rubberneck at an accident and in turn, rear end the car in front of it.
There are lots of examples of not being able to stay in lane, pulling out, not seeing stopped traffic, not paying attention to surroundings. Humans can't even get the trivial simple things right in broad daylight.
(Yes I am aware that you are in the 97% of drivers who are absolutely convinced they are above average. That doesn't make it true. Yes the video mainly has clips from Russia - you can find USA based ones too. And a 9/11 happens on US roads each and every month. People are dying in large numbers because of human drivers.)
Edit: added warning about video content
Plus it's a huge security risk. Cars are internet-connected these days.
I believe that self driving cars will primarily be owned by companies with fleets of them, rather than individual ownership we have today. It doesn't make sense to have them sitting idle 23 hours a day. The owner companies will have a very strong incentive for safety since even rumours would be bad for business. They will also be in a better position to do something about it due to having multiple vehicles.
Not if you're in a highway.
A plane can't just let go of all control surfaces. Heck it can't even leave them where they are. It must do something and always must provide some degree of control. A flying plane is moving at several hundred miles an hour and cannot stop.
Well, I agree. That's why I expect that, along human drivers, the very concept of car ownership will disappear. It's much more efficient to have those cars available on call; they can serve someone else while you're not using them, and they can be parked&recharged at night with much better space-efficiency than cars are parked today.
Software already runs our lives, and worrying about the quality of the underlying software is a strawman. When was the last time a code bug took out a car or an airliner? Some industries have very stringent requirements and QA processes to make sure the code is bug free and can't kill people.
Also, Google's self-driving car is already a far better driver than a majority of the drivers on the road today http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car
Personally I can't wait until the human aspect of driving is completely removed from day-to-day travel.
Apparently infrequently but it does happen a lot of people end up dying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
"The crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 on August 12, 1985 is the single-aircraft disaster with the highest number of fatalities: 520 died on board a Boeing 747. The aircraft suffered an explosive decompression from an incorrectly repaired aft pressure bulkhead, which failed in mid flight, destroying most of its vertical stabilizer and severing all of the hydraulic lines, making the 747 virtually uncontrollable."
"On March 3, 1974, Turkish Airlines Flight 981, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashed in a forest northeast of Paris, France. The London-bound plane crashed shortly after taking off from Orly airport; all 346 people on board died. It was later determined that the cargo door detached, which caused an explosive decompression; this caused the floor just above to collapse."
"On February 19, 2003, an Iranian military Ilyushin Il-76 crashed in mountainous terrain near Kerman in Iran. The official report says bad weather brought the aircraft down; high winds and fog were present at the time of the crash.[21]"
"On May 25, 1979, American Airlines Flight 191, following improper maintenance and the loss of an engine, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10, lost control and crashed near O'Hare International Airport in Des Plaines, Illinois. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground."
"On July 11, 1991, Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, a Douglas DC-8-61 aircraft operated by Nationair Canada, crashed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia after two tires ignited upon takeoff, leading to an in-flight fire. All 261 people died."
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
If you're looking for something that could be software related try Air France Flight 447, though even that is ultimately pilot error. You could also use Ariane 5 flight 1, where a software problem caused vehicle failure.
Software is as good as the best team we can find to write it, and then it can get constantly improved - unlike meat drivers, whose firmware cannot be easily flashed. Moreover, when switching from human control to software you're trading the need for quick evaluation and reaction of driving conditions repeated times number of drivers for a long, concentrated time spent on development and testing. It seems to me like a good trade-off. You can spend all the time you want writing, testing and fixing software up until you reach the point it drives better than humans.
And then you have usual, obvious advantages - self-driving cars won't get tired, emotional, distracted by texting and definitely won't be driving in blatant disregard of traffic laws because "they're pointless and that's how real drivers do things".
I guess chess computers can never beat a human then. Because the software is only as good as the guy writing it.
> What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph?
What happens when a human is inexperienced/texting/drunk/sleepy? Humans have plenty of "bugs" but you don't notice them.
> For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?
Trials. Testing. Every accident (which is inevitable) will be scrutinized and used to improve the system (unlike the 40k annual deaths in the US where that unfortunate experience helps nobody, except perhaps installing a traffic light or barrier).
I could say the same about mechanical or electronics of a vehicle
"I've always been leery of vehicles. They run on mechanical parts. Mechanical parts are only as good as the mechanical engineer that designed them and the quality of material. What if a newly introduced part was not well tested and developed a stress failure due to design or material deficiency. Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph? How do we account for the issue of buggy mechanical parts or electronics "
See how that works? Everything other than your own two legs is man made. It's just the level of maturity of the process and testing and time that eventually gives you enough confidence to start trusting any human made device, whether it is software, mechanical, electric, electronic etc...
Have you ever been to a hospital? Then you've relied on software to keep you alive.
Software controls everything from ovens to nuclear weapons systems. This is not a new concept.
Since lorries rarely just go from marked up parking spot to parking spot, but at their destinations probably have to navigate unconventional layouts, etc, they will for the forseeable future include drivers.
But what I expect to see happen, is that the logistics will become more decentralized, since the driver can now spend more time on administration, and less on driving, essentially taking over the job of the company command central.
Imagine saying, "sorry my car cut off your car!" with sincerity and a little tongue-in-cheek humor as well.
Then there's also the efficiency factor as far as maximizing capacity in lanes and maintaining speed to streamline commuting. Merging could be vastly improved if cars were able to zipper merge better.
[1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...
However their potential for a Black Swan event is enormous. They could run perfectly for 5 years then an unexpected bug could cause 50% of vehicles to spontaneously accelerate to max speed and then pull a hard right..
Sounds like capitalism vs. the environment there.
There's also the possibility that a true AI (not just a complex expert system as above) may be fallible just like a person in not being able to correctly account for the unknown unknowns.
In the end I think it's about the difference between automating positions to make them more efficient (meaning it's still possible to do manually but less efficiently) and relying on things that are essentially impossible to do manually, such as an economic planning AI which may outperform regular economists 95% of the time. The question is what happens in that 5%, and will it catch the problem, and if not, will we keep listening to it as it takes us down a dangerous path.
I don't know what gps resolves to but it's definitely not down to the foot that's required for some of the hairy situations truckers encounter on the road and our visual learning technology is terribly insufficient for even the most basic road conditions much less your average New England construction zone.
Even google cars can't handle weather or potholes or unpredictable situations well. From what I read they had to be coded for very specific paths around San Fran and any unpredictability would cause them trouble.
A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night?
Combine that with some gps autopilot and/or magnetic strips in the road as a guide and that's totally realistic even with todays technology.
These are more likely scenarios.
Edit: even cooler would be autonomous or drone blimps carrying cargo!
http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18...
Precision positioning, using correction data similar to WAAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) but heavily localized can provide sub-centimeter positioning data. This is already in use today for agriculture (self-driving combines, with waypoints configured from the farmer's desktop at home).
> A more likely scenario in my mind is Drone trucks. Why can't a trucker head to the office drive his truck from his desk then go home at night?
UAVs can stay flying if a signal is lost, or navigate using GPS to the nearest friendly runway to autoland if they lose touch with their pilot in the Las Vegas area (where most UAVs are piloted from). Ground vehicles traveling 60+ mph do not have this option. Therefore, AI is a superior option.
I can't imagine no one has built mobile software in this space yet, so there's got to be a reason he doesn't have a tablet sitting on his dashboard. He even built an app but curiously didn't opt to use that as his primary interface for the other functions. Says something about what a working truck driver actually needs & wants vs what a software developer would expect as the solution here.
He's got more information here: http://www.idatatruck.co.uk/
As for the UK, I have even less of an idea. Either way, this fella had to call in each time a haul was transferred, so it seems that he's saved himself and the company a bit of trouble.
The amount of data that you can get is pretty impressive from tracking a driver in real-time. There are even versions with cameras pointed at the driver and the road to record any "adverse events". In this way, it's less focused on the driver and more focused on fleet management.
I interviewed for a job in Las Vegas last year where I was shown this sort of technology for the trucking/shipping industry, albeit more server-based and not so distributed.
My hats off to this guy.