Autonomous vehicles in depth
If you keep an eye on the media you will notice articles about self driving cars appearing, or discussion about autonomous vehicles, so what is going to happen here? We firstly I would like to state that a completely self driving car is possible and inevitable on this planet, the less certain elements relate to the timing (how long we will have to wait) and how capable (how reliably skilled) the car control system will have to be before we trust the autonomous software to drive us to our destination safely every time.
Many of the solutions for autonomous cars at the moment relate to visual data together with radar, gps and in fact anything we as developers can think of that will increase the precision of the control system. I think in the end there will be a number of technologies used by the control system probably 3-5 significant different systems in the first release iteration of the driving system. We will think (rightly) that having several systems running simultaneously will increase redundancy and back up safety-wise.
I had a conversation with a smart young motor vehicle sales manager at a car dealership recently and he said he didn't know when self driving cars would appear, he did speculate that Elon Musk and Tesla would be the first to release this type of vehicle, I can kind of see his thinking. In fact, according to an authoritative source the most likely first large scale implementation of autonomous systems will be for large vehicles like lorries and passenger busses, the argument is one of the cost of the self driving hardware/software being six figures per vehicle initially and then reducing over future decades.
I think fear will play a part in the adoption and eventual acceptance of self driving vehicles, lives will be saved the moment we start using these systems, I think the users will begin to try and find faults, imperfections and problems with the system thinking that they are being helpful. There is an area of concern even for the developers of the system that something has been left out or overlooked and I think the testing of the systems has to be thorough in this case, probably more thorough than almost any other type of previous testing.
Some of the things that I think will happen after implementing self driving vehicles relates to the gift of more time particularly for the driver, I think people will create different and novel uses of their time whilst travelling in self driving cars. For example, watch movies, making phone calls, eating, debates and discussion, writing, playing games, intimacy with other humans. If you take the hours currently used to drive a car and make them productive you can see how this can increase value and success. This kind of fits neatly into hybrid working when you can be at work whilst travelling in your car.
I think some new terminology will be produced, to explain being driven autonomously, what are your predictions?, some of my thoughts are: my car is driving us to... my car calculated a faster route so I am early for my appointment... I told my car to drive me here as quickly as possible.
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