AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by jkravitz61 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

Completely agree. Quote from the article also kind of shows the founder isn't really correlated numbers properly. "Reading that more than 80% of goods are transported by sea, a light bulb went off, says Vollmer. 'We can have a very huge impact,' he remembers thinking." https://www.statista.com/statistics/264024/number-of-merchan... shows that there are roughly 52,000 container ships in existence. 52,000 container ships moving 80% of the world's goods is something I assume people do not want to be automated and want to keep a very watchful eye on- notwithstanding all of the other issues in executing the idea.

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

#62

Post by Piskvorrr » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

mcbits wrote: post #53

Piskvorrr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could carry a set of battery packs on the roof and a pair of drones acting as scouts, one flying ahead with cameras and lidar for 10 minutes while the other one returns to swap out its battery.

Cool...but you need three to have backup, and a battery swap mechanism, and a charging system, and this contraption happens to be more complex than the rest of the car combined. I mean, it could work...but it feels very Inspector Gadget-ish.

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

#63

Post by Piskvorrr » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

tirpen wrote: post #54

philwelch wrote: post #30

> In the near term, it’s more likely that the helm will be controlled by an autonomous system or a remote human operator while a smaller crew takes care of the vessel. Hopefully the helm and navigation controls are governed by a secure, air-gapped connection; otherwise someone could hijack the signal and commandeer the ship remotely, and that would be the first case of actual internet piracy.

There has been experiments with GPS successful Spoofing attacks against ships, so even if it is airgapped, it's not 100% safe. https://insidegnss.com/gps-spoofing-experiment-knocks-ship-o...

Air gap is a metaphor dealing with system borders - if you have a fully trusted input, you don't have an air gap, even if that input comes in wirelessly.

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

#64

Post by stubish » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

Piskvorrr wrote: post #49

stubish wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sensors would work. If the cab isn't already tall enough (they are big!), you could mount the sensors on a pole. The road isn't always flat, but flat enough; I doubt a road train can deal with much of a gradient.

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

#65

Post by stubish » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #57

stubish wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What happens if there's a broken car/truck blocking the road?

The same thing that happens when any road vehicle meets a break down they didn't see in time, except the massive truck is more likely to win.

http://divine.vic.gov.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellbeing/road... has an account of a collision with a road train:

"The road train driver had slowed down to make a left-hand turn at a crossroads and Scotty had slammed into him at over 100 kilometres an hour. According to the autopsy, Scotty was over the legal alcohol limit. The driver of the road train kept going once he had completed the corner. I was later told he thought he felt a shift in the load as he slowed the vehicle to negotiate the corner."

Anyone wanting to make autonomous trucks perfect should remember the bar is actually pretty low...

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

#66

Post by jboles » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

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.

They can, however, hit the brakes as best they can (kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, so this helps a lot), and warn passengers to brace for impact (example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenbrook_rail_accident#Effe...)

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

#67

Post by jboles » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

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?

Because railway lines, in the past, were not designed with autonomous operation in mind. It’s really only suitable for completely isolated systems (high speed bullet-train style lines walled off from their surroundings, or Western Australian iron ore trains miles away from anyone) or lightweight metro/subway style trains (e.g. DLR, airport “air trains”) that travel at low speeds or can stop quickly.

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

#68

Post by samplatt » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

yukonbound wrote: post #51

samplatt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The financial incentive for these mining companies are huge though, as a driver can earn A$120k before even considering the total cost of employment for a remote FIFO site. Mine site are open cast, mine large tonnage and have long mine lives justifying the large initial investment. Australian mining operations are also very dry, which helps a lot. Rain introduces a lot of variables. Large scale automation is particul…

The dry conditions help the automated vehicles, but there's special challenges when it DOES actually rain.... everything tends to be underwater, by a lot :-)