How will self-driving vehicles alter our world?
Despite the numerous obstacles needing to be solved, self-driving vehicles are rapidly becoming a reality, and they have the potential to revolutionize our world in unanticipated ways.
It's late at night in Phoenix, Arizona's metro region. A automobile may be seen coming slowly under the artificial glare of street lighting. The vehicle's active sensors emit a quiet hum. The windscreen illuminates with a green and blue 'W,' providing just enough light to look inside — to a fully vacant driver seat.
As an arrival notice pings on the phone of the person waiting for it, the wheel slowly navigates the curb, parking. A voice greets them over the vehicle's sound system as they open the door to hop aboard. "Good evening," it says, "this automobile is entirely yours — with no one in front."
This is a Waymo One robotaxi that was summoned via an app just 10 minutes ago. One of the numerous milestones signaling that driverless technology is genuinely becoming a part of our lives is the open usage of this service to the general public, which is progressively growing across the United States.
The allure of self-driving cars has always proven tempting. It has the potential to change how we commute and travel great distances, to remove individuals from high-risk work areas, and to simplify our businesses. It's critical to helping us design the cities of the future, where our reliance on and relationship with automobiles is redefined, reducing carbon emissions and paving the path for more sustainable living. It may also make our travels safer. According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.3 million people die each year as a consequence of traffic accidents. "We want safer roads with fewer accidents. That is something that automation may be able to supply in the future "According to Camilla Fowler, head of automated transport at the Transport Research Laboratory in the United Kingdom.
However, much has to change before driverless technology becomes ubiquitous.
"Self-driving cars should be a really relaxing and peaceful method to move from point A to point B. However, not every human motorist in the vicinity would act in this manner "TRL's head scientist for safety and investigations, David Hynd, adds "It has to be able to deal with human drivers speeding or disregarding the laws of the road, for example."
That isn't the only difficulty. Regulation, rewriting the highway law, public perception, upgrading the infrastructure of our streets, towns, and cities, and the great subject of ultimate accountability for road accidents are all things that need to be addressed. "The entire insurance industry is looking into how they're going to deal with that shift from a person being responsible and in charge to the vehicle doing that," says Richard Jinks, vice president of commercial at Oxbotica, an Oxfordshire-based driverless vehicle software company that has been testing its technology in cars and delivery vehicles at various locations across the UK and Europe.
Experts are working toward the ultimate vision of entirely autonomous vehicles that may be deployed and utilized wherever in the world, including inside industry, larger transportation networks, and personal-use automobiles.
But, with all of these roadblocks in place, what does the next decade hold for autonomous vehicles?
In two years' time
For those working in the driverless technology business, the most difficult challenge is ensuring that the automobiles can function safely and successfully in complicated and unpredictable human contexts. The next two years will be devoted to solving this aspect of the riddle.
Experts at the University of Michigan's Mcity Test Facility are working on this. It's a mini-town of sorts, made up of 16 acres of road and traffic infrastructure, and it's the world's first purpose-built testing area for autonomous cars. For testing delivery and ride-hailing, it contains traffic lights and signs, underpasses, building facades, tree cover, home and garage exteriors, and various terrains such as roads, pedestrian walkways, railway lines, and road-markings that the vehicles must negotiate. Experts examine situations that even the most experienced drivers may face, such as children playing in the street or two cars attempting to join at the same moment on a crossroads.
"To test driverless technology like this, hundreds of different variables must be considered in every given circumstance," says Necmiye Ozay, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. Her solution is to assemble a diverse collection of minds.
"We're trying to gather individuals from all across the institution, not just engineers," Ozay adds. "We have people from psychology, more human-machine-interaction type folks, because there are a lot of aspects to this problem we're trying to address when it comes to safety." Ozay and her colleagues may use the facility to test various traffic conditions and investigate how autonomous cars can interact with one another while keeping vehicle and personal data safe from hackers.
The fact that self-driving cabs are currently on the roads in Phoenix, Arizona, is the result of a lengthy testing procedure similar to the one Ozay's team is undertaking. Currently only available to the public as a test service in narrow specified locations, the taxis are expected to be released on a larger and bigger scale in the next two years. For example, Waymo, a California-based startup, is already expanding to additional metropolitan test areas, with robotaxis potentially operating in San Francisco and New York by 2023. But, because "safety takes time," their co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana was hesitant to specify when and where the service may be rolled out further.
In Shanghai, China, AutoX, a start-up backed by Alibaba, will debut its fully autonomous RoboTaxi in 2020. By 2023, their service is projected to be offered in additional Chinese cities, as well as in California.
Much of the autonomous technology is currently in use in industrial settings like mines, warehouses, and ports, but Hynd predicts it will be expanded to "last mile delivery" in the next two years. This refers to the moment at which products and services are delivered to the customer at the end of their journey. For example, self-driving HGV trucks on highways or product and grocery delivery vans.
In five years' time
While Apple has stated that it plans to release completely self-driving electric cars in four years, industry experts are more dubious about the near-future.
The dialogue about regulation and insurance firms' new position in the transportation arena, according to Fowler, has to mature. "It has to be a really incremental strategy where we start with pods and shuttles, or we start with off-highway vehicles where you can see such a gain, and you have a more regulated environment possibly," she adds. "Then we can scale it up and apply it to a wider range of vehicle kinds and application situations."
High-risk locations, such as nuclear power plants and military settings, are one new area where we may expect to see driverless technology employed, according to Fowler. For example, a Rio Tinto mine in Western Australia is now running the world's largest autonomous fleet. The vehicles are managed by a centralized system in Perth, which is thousands of miles distant.
"If you can remove people out of it and have vehicles that drive themselves, and are entirely automated even," adds Fowler, "that's got to be fantastic."
The majority of autonomous technology will remain behind the scenes for the next five years. TRL is looking at the possibility of autonomous HGVs on highways, including platooning vehicles. Platoons are a collection of semi-autonomous vehicles that travel in close proximity to one another, preventing other vehicles from separating them. By driving closer together, cars in a platoon can save fuel by utilizing the slipstream of the truck in front of them, as well as aid to minimize congestion by taking up less total road space. Plus, the first self-driving truck manufacturer, is also in this field, with European pilots starting this year following a successful trial on Wufengshan highway in China's Yangtze Delta industrial center.