Self-driving vehicles

[alexander koryagin]

Hi, All!

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By Jenny Cusack
30th November 2021
Self-driving vehicles are steadily becoming a reality despite the many
hurdles still to be overcome - and they could change our world in some
unexpected ways.


It's a late night in the Metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. Under the
artificial glare of street lamps, a car can be seen slowly approaching.
Active sensors on the vehicle radiate a low hum. A green and blue 'W'
glows from the windscreen, giving off just enough light to see inside -
to a completely empty driver seat.

The wheel navigates the curb steadily, parking as an arrival
notification pings on the phone of the person waiting for it. When they
open the door to climb inside, a voice greets them over the vehicle's
sound system. "Good evening, this car is all yours - with no one
upfront," it says.

This is a Waymo One robotaxi, hailed just 10 minutes ago using an app.
The open use of this service to the public, slowly expanding across the
US, is one of the many developments signalling that driverless
technology is truly becoming a part of our lives.

The promise of driverless technology has long been enticing. It has the
potential to transform our experience of commuting and long journeys,
take people out of high-risk working environments and streamline our
industries. It's key to helping us build the cities of the future, where
our reliance and relationship with cars are redefined - lowering carbon
emissions and paving the way for more sustainable ways of living. And it
could make our travel safer. The World Health Organization estimates
that more than 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road
traffic crashes. "We want safer roads and less fatalities. Automation
ultimately could provide that," says Camilla Fowler, head of automated
transport for the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).

But in order for driverless technology to become mainstream, much still
needs to change.

"Driverless vehicles should be a very calm and serene way of getting
from A to B. But not every human driver around it will be behaving in
that way," says David Hynd, chief scientist for safety and
investigations at TRL. "It's got to be able to cope with human drivers
speeding, for instance, or breaking the rules of the road."

And that's not the only challenge. There's regulation, rethinking the
highway code, public perception, improving the infrastructure of our
streets, towns, cities, and the big question of ultimate liability for
road accidents. "The whole insurance industry is looking into how
they're going to deal with that change from a person being responsible
and in charge to the vehicle doing that," says Richard Jinks, vice
president of commercial at Oxfordshire-based driverless vehicle software
company Oxbotica, which has been testing its technology in cars and
delivery vehicles at several locations across the UK and Europe.

The ultimate vision experts are working towards is of completely
driverless vehicles, both within industry, wider transport networks, and
personal-use cars, that can be deployed and used anywhere and everywhere
around the world.

But with all these hurdles in place, what exactly does the next 10 years
have in store for autonomous vehicles?


Two years from now

The biggest hurdle for those in the driverless technology industry is
how to get the cars to operate safely and effectively in complex and
unpredictable human environments. Cracking this part of the puzzle will
be the major focus of the next two years.

At the Mcity Test Facility at the University of Michigan, experts are
addressing this. The world's first purpose-built testing ground for
autonomous vehicles, it's a mini-town of sorts, made up of 16 acres of
road and traffic infrastructure. It includes traffic signals and signs,
underpasses, building facades, tree cover, home and garage exterior for
testing delivery and ride-hailing, and different terrains such as road,
pedestrian walkways, railway tracks, and road-markings which the
vehicles must navigate. It's here that experts test scenarios that even
the most experienced of drivers may be pressed to handle, from children
playing in the street to two cars trying to merge on a junction at the
same time.

"In order to test driverless technology like this, it depends on
hundreds of different variables in any given situation," explains
Necmiye Ozay, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering
at the University of Michigan. Her solution is to create a group of
varied thinkers.

"We're trying to bring people from different parts of the university -
not only engineers, but we have people from across disciplines such as
psychology, more human-machine-interaction type people, because there
are lots of angles to this problem we are trying to solve when it comes
to safety," says Ozay. In the facility, Ozay and her team can test
different traffic scenarios, as well as explore how autonomous vehicles
communicate with each other yet keep vehicle and personal data secure
from hackers.

That self-driving taxis are already on the roads in Phoenix, Arizona, is
due to a prolonged testing process like the one Ozay's team is
conducting. Currently only available as a test service to the public in
small defined areas, in the next two years there are plans to release
the taxis on a greater and wider scale. For example, US-based company
Waymo is currently rolling out to new city test sites that could very
realistically see robotaxis operational in San Francisco and New York by
2023. But their co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana was cautious to say
what further roll out of its service there might be, and where, because
"safety takes time".

AutoX, a start-up funded by Alibaba, launched its fully driverless
RoboTaxi in Shanghai, China in 2020. By 2023 it's likely their service
will be available in other cities across China, as well as in California.

Much of the driverless technology already in use exists in industrial
settings like mines, warehouses, and ports, but Hynd believes in the
next two years we can expect to see this extended to "last mile
delivery". This means the final part of a journey for goods and services
- the point at which they are delivered to the consumer. For example,
autonomous HGV trucks on motorways or even delivery vehicles for
products and groceries.


Five years from now

While Apple says it is aiming to launch fully self-driving electric cars
four years from now, industry experts are more cautious about what the
near-future holds.

According to Fowler, the conversation around regulation and insurance
companies' new role within this transport space needs to mature. "It's
got to be a very iterative approach where we're starting with pods and
shuttles, or we're starting with off-highway vehicles where you can see
such a benefit, and you've got a more controlled environment
potentially, and what works with that," she says. "Then we can scale it
up and across more vehicle types, more use cases."
Autonomous shuttles, such as these in Iserlohn, Germany, could help to
link passengers on public transport to other parts of a city (Credit: Alamy)

One new space we can expect to see driverless technology deployed in is
high-risk environments, from nuclear plants to military settings, to
limit the dangers to human life, says Fowler. A Rio Tinto mine in
Western Australia, for example, is currently operating the largest
autonomous fleet in the world. The trucks are controlled by a
centralised system miles away in Perth.

"If you can take people out of that and you can have vehicles that are
driving themselves, and are fully automated even, if you've got somebody
who's remotely needing to control that vehicle in that high-risk
environment then that's got to be good," says Fowler.

In the next five years most driverless technology will remain behind the
scenes. TRL is investigating the potential for driverless HGVs on
motorways, including the idea of platooning vehicles. Platoons are a
group of semi-autonomous vehicles that drive a close distance between
each other, stopping other vehicles from separating them. By driving
closer together, vehicles in a platoon can be more fuel efficient by
taking advantage of the slipstream of the truck in front while also
helping to reduce congestion as the lorries take up less overall space
on the road. Also in this space is Plus, the first self-driving truck
manufacturer, whose European pilots commenced this year after a
successful trial on Wufengshan highway in China's Yangtze Delta economic
centre.

Away from these industries, Ozay further predicts that "we will possibly
see lighter robotic vehicles that can potentially use sidewalks and bike
paths with limited speeds - for delivering things such as food and
groceries."

When it comes to public transport, Oxbotica is also working with
German-based vehicle systems specialist ZF over the next five years to
make the driverless shuttle a true mainstay for European cities,
operating on roads, as well as at airports, much in the same way buses
do now. "The shuttles in airports we see today on rails won't need those
rails in five years from now. This means driverless shuttles have the
potential to transport you from the car park to the airport, then
straight through to your gate and the plane," Jinks explains.

+=====+
My hope is that cars will be smart enough to say 'yes' or 'no' when
asked if they can reliably and safely get a non-driver from point A to
point B on a given day - Necmiye Ozay
+=====+

For users, this could mean more reliable and cost-efficient transport
systems. "Interlinking autonomous transport systems to bring a public
transport system that is as efficient as you jumping in your own car and
driving it yourself has got to be the answer to congestion in the
future," adds Jinks.


Seven years from now

All experts agree that the next seven years will depend on the successes
and failures of initial deployments, and how safety and public trust
evolves accordingly. However, most hope that city redesigns will enable
more adoption of the technology and help move us into modern, and more
efficient ways of living. "If you live in a dense, urban area, the hope
is that you'd be able to rely on mobility as a service. You could dial
up the car, it would arrive in two minutes, and you make your journey.
You wouldn't need to have those vast rows of parked cars in your street,
which makes the street more navigable for the automated vehicle," says Hynd.

Without parked cars lining the street, roads could be narrower, making
way for more green spaces. But while proponents of self-driving vehicles
insist they will make our roads safer, there are some who feel
pedestrians and autonomous vehicles simply can't mix. It could mean that
our cities and the way we use them may need to be reimagined.

Some of this thinking is already taking place. In 2018, IKEA developed a
concept autonomous vehicle that can double up as meeting rooms, hotels,
and stores. The impact this type of innovation would have is reduced
requirement for travel in the first place, offering instead
interchangeable, on-demand environments as and when we need them. Our
needs could be met right where we are.

Ozay expects many more self-driving options to be available for
customers during this time, including in the passenger vehicle space.
"My hope is that cars will be smart enough to say 'yes' or 'no' when
asked if they can reliably and safely get a non-driver from point A to
point B on a given day, by analysing the weather and traffic conditions
beforehand," she explains.


10 years from now

Despite all the developments and innovations the next decade is likely
to hold, some experts still feel we might be a way off from full
deployment of driverless vehicles. By 2031, "full-self driving -
human-level or above, in all possible conditions, where you can put kids
by themselves in the car to send them to arbitrary locations without
worrying - is not something I expect to see," says Ozay.

Hynd agrees that full automation is unlikely on this timescale. "With
anything transport infrastructure, anything that society uses, so many
other things need to come into play. And I don't just mean regulation,"
he says. Safety will be a major hurdle, especially for countries slower
to adopt the change because of the huge costs involved. Infrastructure
will also dictate how fast and effectively this technology can roll out,
and public perception and willingness to use autonomous vehicles will
need to increase according to Hynd.

But not everyone agrees. Jinks is confident that we'll see autonomous
vehicles on the roads at the same time as human-driven vehicles in 10
years from now. In this vein, you may very well be stepping onto a
driverless shuttle at the airport, then into a self-driving taxi to take
you to your final destination.

Owning a driverless car in the next 10 years is less likely - it'll
still be too expensive for most people, according to Hynd. But the
promise of driverless technology is about unchaining us from our
reliance on cars, and how that can transform the use of our time and our
environment.

"This is one of the biggest engineering problems that we're trying to
solve in a century," Jinks says. "It will be an evolution over time from
less complex environments and capabilities, to more complex, to
everywhere. It's a continuum, and think about that continuum... It will
keep improving over time. These things will continuously learn from each
other."

Much in the same way that electric charging stations have slowly entered
car parks, side streets, and service stations, so too will autonomous
vehicles eventually make their way into our everyday worlds. Years from
now, we may well be wondering how we ever lived without them.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-how-driverless-cars-will-change-our-world
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Bye, All!
Alexander Koryagin