Interesting Links for 13-07-2021

[andrewducker]

Here are some of the ways that Tesla's automated driving is going to kill people

(tags:driving automation Doom )

Glass octopus with transparent skin captured on camera in rare footage

(tags:octopus transparency ocean )

Comments

[naath]

We will get this self driving thing eventually, and being bad at it is an essential step... but I do wish there was less hype about it (I have seen human drivers do all that rubbish though, so AI is already better than the worst people who drive on the road)

[andrewducker]

I'm looking forward to us being good at it. Was hoping we'd be there by now. But I don't want them driving on the road until they're above average.

[dewline]

One of the labs devoted to getting humans to become good at self-driving cars is in the western reaches of Ottawa, with Blackberry, Carleton University and the feds throwing talent and cash at the project. So I expect some progress to come from the borough of Kanata eventually.

[danieldwilliam]

Another ten years would be my guess.

[andrewducker]

It could well be. And quite possibly in certain niches before they go as wide as, say, Edinburgh.

[danieldwilliam]

I think you have to factor in at least 1 accident with double digit fatalities of cute rich white kids and the delay caused by the public enquiry in to that.

Niche uses very likely. Mining, warehousing and associated logistics, buses in controlled environments like airport parking come to mind.

[andrewducker]

I believe some are making advances in enclaves for elderly people, where speeds are restricted and the area is very well known.

[danieldwilliam]

There's an argument (again involving a political process) that we should design autonomous vehicles to operate at 20 kilometres per hour in urban settings. They don't need to go faster as that's about the current average speed of a vehicle in an urban setting. Autonomous vehicles ought to spend more time at close to the maximum speed so could be peak speed limited with little loss in average speed. Perhaps a small gain. Slower peak speeds would reduce the risk of catestophic failure.

[armiphlage]

In Canada, it would also make sense to restrict them at first to highways posted for 80 km/h or greater; those have a limited number of access ramps, median dividers, nearly no intersections, and no bicycles or pedestrians.

The first users would likely be be freight trucks, as AVs wouldn't require paying a driver with an AZ license, and wouldn't worry about the hours-of-rest limitations imposed on human drivers.

[danieldwilliam]

I see that but what happens when the lorries have to come off the highway? Are there lots of logistics centres very close to highways? I would expect so.

[armiphlage]

If long-haul trucks aren't able to drive in local traffic, it'd still make sense for them to handle the first thousand kilometers on divided highways, then pull into a parking lot immediately after exiting the highway. They could either swap trailers at that point, or have a human driver enter the cab to take over for the last few kilometers.

Basically, autonomous highway driving would be taking the place of a rail grid in a properly-designed system.

[danieldwilliam]

There's an important difference in there that I'd been blind to. I think in Europe, and certainly the UK, you couldn't drive 1,000 miles without coming off the motorway system or going through a place where the motorway system was functionally part of the road system. Or the load would go by train. That is probably less true in North America.

[andrewducker]

Or Australia!

[danieldwilliam]

That's an interesting and possibly a great shout. There are lots of long distance lorries in Australia. The roads aren't highways. There are lots of single carriage ways but not a lot of complex traffic.

[andrewducker]

Apparently a bit of a problem!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-06-27/driverless-trucks-australia/100241248

[danieldwilliam]

I'm not surprised by that.

[armiphlage]

Cross-country all-highway truck transport seems to be the norm in North America, unless you are shipping multiple containerloads a day, and are willing to take a week longer for your product to reach its destination. It doesn't make sense to me, as there is a rail network (although not as dense as in Europe), and it SHOULD be faster and more economical to go by rail. With modern technology, it SHOULD be easy to automatically route a container to a rail depot within a few hundred kilometers of its final destination.

Of course, it also SHOULD be fast and affordable to use modern robotics to cut stone into pavers and curbs at less cost (and lower environmental impact) than concrete. But instead, construction companies pour concrete slabs, then pay a worker to press in molds to give the appearance of stone pavers. Or even pre-cast the "stone-look" concrete pavers in a factory, so there's still the labour of hand-laying the concrete pavers.

[danieldwilliam]

Serious question on the stone pavers for concrete pavers swap - are you envisaging some sort of CNC cutting and shaping process? We are probably close to the situation where I could order a couple of hundred paving slabs and a herd of robots cut them out of the quarry, shape them, load them on to a delivery vehicle and arrive at my site within 48 hours. But not quite.

Less serious comment - I have just delighted myself by imagining a herd of robots quarrying inside a large mountain, turning the inside of the mountain in to paving slabs whilst building a pumped storage hydro-scheme.

[armiphlage]

CNC cutting of stones is exactly my ultimate goal.

In Canada, we use a lot of steel-reinforced concrete for infrastructure (especially for culverts, bridges and overpasses). We also apply a lot of salt to the roads in winter, to cut through the ice that forms on driving surfaces (especially on top of bridges and overpasses, where ice forms before roadways resting on subsoil). When the salt penetrates to the rebar, corrosion and spalling begin.

CAD software plus CNC stonecutting makes shallow logarithmic pure-compression arches easy. These could replace reinforced concrete in many applications, increasing the lifespan of infrastructure projects while reducing maintenance costs and carbon footprints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skew_arch

[danieldwilliam]

I used to live in Swindon, not far from one of the examples given in the wikipedia article.

[jducoeur]

When a couple of my friends graduated from college, the only-half-tongue-in-cheek directions they gave to their new house were something like:

• Turn right out of the campus front gate.
• Turn left just before the end of the street.
• At the end of the road, turn left.
• We're the third house on the right.

That quietly glossed over 3000 miles of straight highway between the second and third bullets, all the way from the east to west coasts of North America. (Almost from one end of Interstate 90 to the other.)

[danieldwilliam]

I had a similar experience once when I lived in Townsville in Queensland. Someone asked me for directions to Darwin.

"Turn right," I said, "through three sets of traffic lights, turn right at the T-junction, through two sets of lights,"

"And that's the road to Darwin?"

"No, that's you in Darwin."

The T-junction was Three Ways in the NT, about fifteen hundred clicks west.

[andrewducker]

Speaking of warehousing, did you see the supermarket warehouse video the other day?

[danieldwilliam]

I've just caught up on it.

It occurs to me that more and more of our world will be deliberately shaped around efficient and effective robots rather than trying to fit robots in to a human space.

[autopope]

I notice that all the Tesla self-driving "bloopers" happened in urban settings.

I suspect it's pretty much there already for motorway/interstate highway driving, which has a much more constrained subset of stuff to identify and react to.

I really wouldn't want it to be legal to use it in the UK off the motorway or dual carriageway network, though. At least, not in its current state.

And marketing it as "autopilot" is just plain wrong. Decades of the airline industry and the press mischaracterising aircraft autopilots as being able to fly the plane from take-off to landing has spread huge public misconceptions about what autopilots are and can do: if it was marketed as "adaptive cruise control with automatic lane-following and overtaking" that'd be both more accurate, less likely to mislead the public ... and much closer to what real aviation autopilots do anyway.

[andrewducker]

Agreed. Probably good on the motorway, really not good in urban settings, possibly impossible in rural settings.

[danieldwilliam]

Would autonomous vehicles cope better with the more complex and dynamic urban environment if they were sharing information with each other?

[mtbc]

Lovely-looking octopus.