Would it still be an advanced net if you had humans in the trucks as a 'backup', with the autonomous driving doing 90% of the 'boring' driving down the highways? Humans would still drive the last mile (ha!).
Would that be significant safer and more efficient to make it worthwhile?
If you limit autonomous driving to the main freight routes on the highway, I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.
I think that will be the near future; we've already done the exact same thing with airline pilots, who spend most of a flight on autopilot (hence the expression). This allows them to do long shifts with much lower mental pressure.
I'm even imagining 24 hour drivers, who let the truck drive autonomously at night on quiet roads at low speeds while they sleep and live in the truck. A bit like lonely spaceship pilots from science fiction.
i think this is a likely first application. you can boost schedules and efficiency massively by simply allowing a truck to drive itself to the next waypoint overnight (maybe not even the whole night -- just to the next safe stopping area) when the driver would normally be sleeping. if there's an emergency, simply stop and pull over and alert the driver.
this is probably also much easier to sell to existing industry and government. you're not eliminating drivers at all, but instead making their jobs easier and profits higher. having zero autonomous trucks on the road during the day is also a PR positive. no road tripping families put at risk, etc.
They started truck automation in mining and container terminals in ports. Areas with no other traffic and the possibility of active guidance (beacons along/embedded in the route and so on.)
Highways are the next obvious use. I could see automated trucks driving down the transcanadian highway for example or similar long interstate stretch.
I gotta say though, if we're going that way, why not go intermodal, add a RR right of way through the interstate with a double-track, operate automated freight trains and automated transshipment terminals. Just load the trailer onto the train and go. I know rail isn't sexy but it'd make sense in terms of carbon footprint (trains could be multimode diesel-electric/electric depending on corridor.) And most of that rail net could be fully automated.
Rail suffers a lot from inflexibility and the massive redundancy required to survive the occasional track maintenance. Trailer-on-railroad does not really improve on that. A true logistics moonshot would have to go all the way to "roadgoing, powered railcars" that could platoon on that double-track and maybe opt into some form of power delivery (overhead line?) where available, switching on the fly between rubber/air and steel wheelsets as required.
The beauty of this expensive approach is that it would not only obviate waiting for a train going in the right direction and the requirement for mode switching terminals (those are just the fair weather sailing benefits), but also eliminate the inherent fragility of highly interdependent railroad schedules. Where conventional rail quickly breaks down completely, road can gracefully degrade towards a massive traffic jam slowly grinding forward on some dirt road fallback route.
Roads are really expensive. Adding rail lines is cheaper to build and operate so a dedicated automated truck lane seems like a poor idea. If anything building 100+ MPH rail for long trips like this seems like a great investment until you adjust for actual traffic levels.
> If you limit autonomous driving to the main freight routes on the highway, I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.
It is 100% certain without any doubt whatsoever that this is how it will start. It will start with dedicated interstate roads (or lanes) just for driverless trucks, and then cars.
After some time all freeways will be 100% driverless. I don't anticipate mixed use (driverless + drivers) ever happening.
Local roads (i.e. uncontrolled access) is many many decades away.
Those cars are not able to handle general purpose driving.
Say you are on a one-way road, and at the bottom of it an ambulance is blocking the road - so you need to back all the way out of the road (or u-turn).
No driverless car today can handle such a situation. There are many more real-world examples. The cars today are just demos, not usable products.
Can you elaborate on why you don't see mixed use ever happening? Do you think its regulatory, liability or technological... or maybe some combination of the three?
Driverless car in a dedicated lane. That will be first since it's much easier to build than local driving or mixed long distance. It also covers the most important need (i.e. much less economic reason to make one for local use).
Lots more people see how great that is, so more cars (and trucks) will be rapidly added. That lane will reach capacity, so more lanes will be added.
Within 5 to 10 years driverless long distance will be the norm, and long distance driver cars will be rare. (All the cars will be have mixed modes, with the driver taking over for local streets.)
Every new car will advertise that it includes diverless mode as a feature.
All this will happen so fast there won't be time to perfect a mixed use car.
By the time they do perfect a local driverless car virtually all cars on the market will already have long-distance driverless mode. And the ones that don't will probably get retrofit kits.
So at no point will mixed long distance ever be a thing - by the time the technology is able to do that, there won't be any cars that need it.
> Would it still be an advanced net if you had humans in the trucks as a 'backup', with the autonomous driving doing 90% of the 'boring' driving down the highways? Humans would still drive the last mile (ha!).
You're exhibiting the AI effect [0]. Could you program the software that makes vehicles drive around "boring" roads? Of course it's advanced.
> I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.
Self driving vehicles are already a thing. They're driving around the bay are all the time [1]. They'll be "happening" in the delivery market much sooner than 20 years, like in the next 5. The state of California has already started the regulatory process [2].
At first I had no idea what you're referring to, but then I realised the confused stemmed from my typo. I meant to ask whether it was a significant advancement, not an advanced net/AI.
I know self driving cars are a "thing" already, but only in very limited and constrained circumstances. Last time I checked, Google's can only drive on roads where they've meticulously already mapped out everything from the height of the curb to the exact location of the traffic lights. That's not to discount their work, but it's still in the very early stages of the self driving dream of having a car that can drive you anywhere while you watch a movie.
Self driving cars technology is AI. It is an advancement, a very significant one that will save many, many lives every day. Self driving cars are not in an early stage. Self driving technology is already worth in the billions. See the GM acquisition of Cruise. These cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on real roads that other people are also driving, probably including to a movie theater. You are discount the work and you're doing it from a place of complete ignorance.
Woah. I'm not quite sure where the negative sentiment came from - I'm not trying to discount anyone's work, and there's definitely no ignorance. Maybe I'm not optimistic, but I'm definitely not being ignorant.
> Self driving cars technology is AI. It is an advancement
If you go back up the comment chain that I was replying to, you'll note that I don't dispute (or even talk about) whether self driving cars is AI or not - I don't really care to take part of that conversation.
I was commenting on whether if you put self driving tech in trucks if it 'can only' self-drive on the highways, and require human drivers to drive the final mile, is that a significant enough improvement to make it worthwhile deploying it?
I know we've made a significant amount of progress when it comes to this sort of stuff, but we're so much further away from the dream of ubiquitous self driving cars (or even where human-driven cars are illegal or have their own financial/legal drawbacks). I know (Google's) self driving cars have driven x-thousand miles, which is crazy impressive, but they've only done that on like .1% of US roads[0]. They also have trouble driving in varying conditions, like rain or construction or whatever. I can't see ubiquitous self driving cars for consumers really happening in the next 20-50 years.
I can see, however, this bits and pieces of this tech make its way into cars (like Tesla's autopilot, or the self-parking features) a lot sooner than that. Or into trucks driving down the highway. And then Uber/GM/whoever launches self-driving transport in select cities on select routes, and then all over the city, and then in every main city.
[0] Totally made up number, but I assume you'll get my point.
Well I find it always incredible that the point of self driving cars that is most needed is the hardest part and least likely to occur anytime soon, that is driving in bad to very bad conditions.
though with the prevalence of texting while driving maybe cars will not necessarily need to always drive but simply take the needed emergency action
Would that be significant safer and more efficient to make it worthwhile?
If you limit autonomous driving to the main freight routes on the highway, I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.