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AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

forbes.com

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Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#41

Post by robfitz »

ehnto wrote: post #13
akira2501 wrote: post #5

Several issues with this idea: 1) On the open ocean, what is there to even avoid? In the harbor, you often don't have a choice; the harbor master is going to _require_ you to pick up a harbor pilot who is rated and certified for the harbor you'll be in and they must be in command of the ships steering and propulsion in order for your ship to even enter their waters. 2) Only 20% of the global merchant fleet is dedicat…

There are some ships, small sailing ships for example, that do not get picked up by radar. They often need to get radar reflectors fitted to be visible. You certainly wouldn't want to be on a sailing vessel while an automated cargo ship barrels down on you. Sailing ships get right of way to powered ships as well so detecting the difference between vessels is important and the automation would need to take that into a…

(I recently sailed through heavy shipping areas like the channel and Seine on a small sailboat.)

Assuming they can see you, the captain of a large boat will try to give way rather than squash you (they'd be _super_ angry about having to do so, though), but in practice they're already hugely under-crewed, so there's a large percentage of time when you (as a smaller boat) can't count on that. And even if they are actively looking out, small boats are just... hard to see. Almost all of the deaths in sailing come from a small boat's crew falling asleep without appropriate watch (you're meant to fully scan the horizon at least every 20 minutes) and getting run down by a big boat.

This is a long way of saying that big boats are already mostly automated, and I think everyone will be safer if we go all the way on it, along with more robust sensors, instead of just pretending that there's always someone doing a perfect lookout.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#42

Post by dogma1138 »

samplatt wrote: post #28
jcranmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you're talking about the kind of trains pulling 1,000 mile runs as opposed to metro trains. Train drivers do more than just drive a train. They also have to deal with dropping off and picking up cars from the consist. They also need to monitor track conditions that aren't necessarily easy to pick up from track circuits, such as deep snow ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yja2VmZOfdA shows you how some tr…

The mining operations in Western Australia have also invested heavily in autonomous EVERYTHING. The massive dump-trucks and drill rigs are going autonomous, with anywhere between 10% and 100% (depending on the site) of the heavy vehicles are now driverless.

Closed environments like mining sites or airports are much more easy to automate.

The routes can be easily predefined, they are relatively short and you can add additional beacons / markers that make things much easiser.

I think the problem with trains outside of say closed loop underground trains that you have a lot of tracks in varying conditions, you can have track abstractions you have a multi agent environment with crossing and that at least as far as cargo trains go the engineer does more than just drive the train they handle many more operations.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#44

Post by Piskvorrr »

isostatic wrote: post #23
tialaramex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human can look out of the front window and notice that e.g. the cliff above has fallen onto the track, or cows have broken through a fence and are now standing on the track. Something like the DLR normally operates autonomously, there's a member of staff trained to drive it on every train but it's actually slower and more dangerous if they have to. But that's a completely grade separated system, cows on the DLR i…

At high speeds a driver can’t do anything if they see an obstruction. Breaking distances on trains tend to be measured in miles, not metres.

Braking to a stop is the best option (which is not always available, yes). Emergency braking to half the speed is the difference between "8 fatalities" and "hundreds of fatalities"; Ek=mv^2 - note that velocity squared*.

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Stud%C3%A9nka_train_wreck - train hits bridge at 90 kph instead of 135 kph; a 2/3 speed, but less than 1/2 the kinetic energy.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#45

Post by stubish »

isostatic wrote: post #23
tialaramex wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human can look out of the front window and notice that e.g. the cliff above has fallen onto the track, or cows have broken through a fence and are now standing on the track. Something like the DLR normally operates autonomously, there's a member of staff trained to drive it on every train but it's actually slower and more dangerous if they have to. But that's a completely grade separated system, cows on the DLR i…

At high speeds a driver can’t do anything if they see an obstruction. Breaking distances on trains tend to be measured in miles, not metres.

Australia uses what are called road trains, which essentially is 3 full sized semi-trailer loads pulled by a massive single cab travelling 90km/h. A good place to find them are the highways between Adelaide and Perth or Adelaide and Darwin. At night, their stopping distance is greater than their headlights can reach; if they see something, it is too late to stop and the choice is swerving and likely tipping or plowing on through. This is why they have bull bars on the front (you might know them as cow catchers), so when there is a herd of cows on the road staring you down the cab can plow straight through without slowing.

(or maybe tech has caught up in the last few decades and they detect obstructions from further away, but that would spoil the story)

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#46

Post by cm2187 »

jcranmer wrote: post #24
m0zg wrote: post #8

Can someone explain why there aren't that many autonomous _trains_? And I don't mean SFO airport train and others like it, but a real, full-size train moving people or goods around the country. Seems like every other year a train flies off the rails due to nothing more than negligence of train's engineer. Why not automate this completely? You don't even have to steer.

I'm assuming you're talking about the kind of trains pulling 1,000 mile runs as opposed to metro trains. Train drivers do more than just drive a train. They also have to deal with dropping off and picking up cars from the consist. They also need to monitor track conditions that aren't necessarily easy to pick up from track circuits, such as deep snow ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yja2VmZOfdA shows you how some tr…

Amusingly, in your video, the view from the driver is completely obstructed by the snow.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#47

Post by taneq »

King-Aaron wrote: post #39
taneq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...a driverless train..." > "The driver had stepped off the train..." It wasn't a driverless train (except in the technical sense that the driver wasn't onboard) and the quote comes from CFMEU (for non-locals, that's the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, a massive workers' union) which has a vested interest in pushing back against automation.

The 'driver' operates a dead man switch in a lot of cases, and that's about it. I can't recall if this train itself was an automated test bed, but a lot of BHP and Rio's rail operations are managed from the control center in Perth, and drivers are (usually :P ) aboard in case of problems. Edit: So it looks like even though they've had the technology going for a while, Rio only just delivered their first 'real' loaded…

Easy mistake to make, the story was a bit misleading calling it 'driverless'!

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#48

Post by yason »

I could see a potential with completely autonomous vessels that could sail for weeks/months on solar/wind power without any human presence. Crew would only board the ship when approaching a harbour, and steer her to the dock.

Solar panels and wind turbines could generate electricity which would be stored in batteries and then used to drive electric motors propelling the ship. Slower than diesel but also cheaper and with less moving parts.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#49

Post by Piskvorrr »

stubish wrote: post #45
isostatic wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At high speeds a driver can’t do anything if they see an obstruction. Breaking distances on trains tend to be measured in miles, not metres.

Australia uses what are called road trains, which essentially is 3 full sized semi-trailer loads pulled by a massive single cab travelling 90km/h. A good place to find them are the highways between Adelaide and Perth or Adelaide and Darwin. At night, their stopping distance is greater than their headlights can reach; if they see something, it is too late to stop and the choice is swerving and likely tipping or plowin…

Tech would have needed to see through terrain (road is not always flat - even though sometimes the crests and dips are so rare there's a warning sign ahead: https://media.gettyimages.com/videos/outback-road-sign-of-cr... )...and be retrofitted into the existing cabs. So, no: the tool of choice is still brute force, literally.

Re: AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans

#50

Post by Piskvorrr »

m0zg wrote: post #19
sho wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? There are dozens of installations worldwide with many more on the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_... If you are talking about intercity trains instead of metro systems - although metros typically handle many times the number of passengers - China is currently trialling driverless technologies on its Fuxing class HSR on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou route with expected entry into serv…

Sure, there are autonomous trains in some places, I said so right in my post. But why aren't _all_ of them autonomous by now?

Upgrading is hard, retrofitting is harder (e.g. NYC subway runs on a century-old technology), and most importantly, it all comes with a hefty price tag, all for an incremental improvement only. Follow the money.
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