Driverless Bus

Driverless bus

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Mercedes Benz Driverless Bus

Mercedes Benz recently unveiled it's new future bus. This bus is a driverless bus and was tested on an approximately 20km trip in Amsterdam. It completed the 20km trip without any hiccups, in a real life traffic situation. Mercedes Benz sees this method of transport as the future of inter city transport.

The bus has two horizontal lights below the windscreen to indicate if the bus is driven on auto pilot or manually. Blue indicates automatic and white indicates Manual. (When it is white, keep out of it's way, you never know what the human driver will do next. LOL)

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The bus travels up to 70km/h and stops within the nearest centimeter at bus stops and traffic lights. It brakes automatically when it encounters obstacles or pedestrians. It also communicates with traffic signals.

The technologically systems on board includes ten cameras, short and long range radar systems to help it navigate the traffic.

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The bus itself is also ultra modern and has a lounge at the back for passengers to relax in while traveling. (I wonder how many people will be able to relax, knowing the bus has no driver??) At least the bus does have a driver on board to monitor safety and to take over if needed.

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The photo above shows a driverless bus that was introduced in the French city of Lyon in September 2016, this is said to be the first driverless bus service in the world. This vehicle is however not as advanced as the Mercedes buss featured above. This bus travels at about 10km/h on a 10 minute long route where other vehicles are not allowed, as this vehicle cannot drive around other vehicles. It has a number of detectors to determine it's position and to avoid collisions.

It looks as if the driverless cars will be with us shortly. You can read the article by @stellabelle on smart pavements that also link to the driverless car technology.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the post