381–390 of 471 posts
The trucks behind could be connected wirelessly. Or they could even use wires. Some sort of machine vision could keep an eye on the truck in front, adjusting distance as necessary.
Obviously that takes coordinating trucks going to the same direction but it seems reasonable to have a hub-and-spoke layout where "trains" are broken apart and re-assembled.
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Well even Germany isn't going to start with self-driving trucks driving everywhere. Every country has standardization problems... in Germany there are ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked). In the US we have inconsistent/missing signs, dense urban areas built for small cars, and all kinds of crazy human driving. My guess is actually opposite of yours though. I think sho…
> ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked). And that are routinely blocked by trucks with human drivers who keep forgetting their required height clearance. If there was a way to make shipping companies fully responsible for all the delays caused but stuck trucks, laser-scanner assistance systems that stop the truck before it is stopped by the arch would already be a popul…
I'm surprised that I never see mention of having one human at the front and a dozen slave trucks driving behind. The trucks behind could be connected wirelessly. Or they could even use wires. Some sort of machine vision could keep an eye on the truck in front, adjusting distance as necessary. Obviously that takes coordinating trucks going to the same direction but it seems reasonable to have a hub-and-spoke layout wh…
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If I were younger and not married, I could totally see taking a job as a trucker and guiding it on and off the highway, and doing coding or whatever in the meantime. It'd be a chance to go different places and have some adventure, while continuing to do another job that I love. It's not unlike many college kids taking a job as a security guard and "watching monitors" while doing their homework, etc. (Another thing th…
You don't get the point. You won't be traveling inside that truck. You will only drive trucks in and out of your city.
1) Automated gears and obstacle detection - we already have this. 2) Have the truck stay in one lane and maintain distance - We're close. This means humans stay in truck and solve the hard problems when encountered. (Kind of like pilots) 3) Automated port to port driving without humans. 4) Destination to destination driving without humans.
The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. What about the roads themselves? I'm curious how an autonomous truck will handle a snow-covered highway, fog, potholes, and tight corners caused by narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc. This is a way of life where I live (Boston area). The article about the Russian driverless van…
One accident might set back consumer driving for 50 years, but not commercial. The safety record simply needs to be much better than human drivers, which shouldn't be too hard, because one driver is already taken out of the equation. And there are billions upon billions to be saved, in our corporatocracy of the USA, it WILL happen. Bad roads shouldn't be too much of a problem, they can just use humans on the bad road…
Beyond a mandate from the government, I have a hard time seeing the trucking industry giving all their profits over to google, tesla, gm, mercedes, and co.
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Nobody is saying this is logical. The point is that people will use this as a hyped-up political foothold to point out why automated drivers are "unsafe" as well as "taking our jobs".
Fun fact: automated elevators were considered to be "unsafe" and "taking our jobs", too. Somehow we got past that one!
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"What about the roads themselves? I'm curious how an autonomous truck will handle a snow-covered highway, fog, potholes, and tight corners caused by narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc." It won't; at least, it won't need to handle narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc. The autonomous truck need not drive the whole route that a human driver does now. Drive down the Ohio Turnpike and you will see numerous p…
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 p…
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.
I feel like it's the only way to redistribute the wealth accumulated by the few actors that will control these giant automated industries.
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My point is that all of these are "simple" problems. Oh the truck will identify a plastic bag. Oh the truck will have a cargo manifest and drive accordingly. But these are all new technologies. Our visual recognition libraries are nowhere near ideal. I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. I'm pretty sure that all that LIDA…
> I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. Really? I find this surprising. Do you have any links or sources? I'd like to learn more.
http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.ht...