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Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been

Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only need to be better than the average human driver. Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the competition?

jpindar 9y ago
Not all trains are autonomous, and they have been known to crash due to operator error.
- lb1lf 9y ago
  Besides, trains run on tracks, each of which accomodates one train at any given time and rarely intersect; additionally, there's all sorts of signalling and safety infrastructure embedded with the track... In stark contrast with lane-swerving cars, intersections everywhere, temporary rerouting because of roadworks &c. Running trains must be orders of magnitude simpler than fully autonomous vehicles. As for planes, they have a massive benefit in being engineered and maintained for levels of reliability no car can ever hope to achieve, having an awful lot of empty air around them (not to mention being able to move in the Z plane, too, to avoid collisions. I don't doubt there are many lessons to be learned by designers of autonomous vehicles from work already put down in the fields of trains and planes - however, I'd argue they are very different problems.
semi-extrinsic 9y ago
> intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous This is a highly disingenious use of the word autonomous. Airplane "autopilots" are given a set of waypoints and will fly a straight line between those. That's been possible with cars since (at least) the 1960s too; today it's easy enough that you could give it as an end-of-term project for a bunch of robotics undergrads. It's also completely useless outside of very specialized situations like the mining dump trucks you mention.
mandevil 9y ago
Planes are a good argument for the opposite. Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why? Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene right this second, not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.) So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?
- smileysteve 9y ago
  Because you reference AF447; Autopilot systems also added additional sensors (satellite assisted speed) for the system to have redundancies.
taneq 9y ago
All of those things have a team of engineers maintaining the hardware and configuration of each installation, and operate "on rails" (either GPS-defined or literal) in very carefully controlled environments. It's like saying that we've had factory robotics for decades and so we should soon have useful robotic housekeepers (in the general sense, not the Roomba sense).

jpindar 9y ago

Not all trains are autonomous, and they have been known to crash due to operator error.

lb1lf 9y ago
Besides, trains run on tracks, each of which accomodates one train at any given time and rarely intersect; additionally, there's all sorts of signalling and safety infrastructure embedded with the track... In stark contrast with lane-swerving cars, intersections everywhere, temporary rerouting because of roadworks &c. Running trains must be orders of magnitude simpler than fully autonomous vehicles. As for planes, they have a massive benefit in being engineered and maintained for levels of reliability no car can ever hope to achieve, having an awful lot of empty air around them (not to mention being able to move in the Z plane, too, to avoid collisions. I don't doubt there are many lessons to be learned by designers of autonomous vehicles from work already put down in the fields of trains and planes - however, I'd argue they are very different problems.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago

> intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous This is a highly disingenious use of the word autonomous. Airplane "autopilots" are given a set of waypoints and will fly a straight line between those. That's been possible with cars since (at least) the 1960s too; today it's easy enough that you could give it as an end-of-term project for a bunch of robotics undergrads. It's also completely useless outside of very specialized situations like the mining dump trucks you mention.

mandevil 9y ago

Planes are a good argument for the opposite. Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why? Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene right this second, not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.) So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?

smileysteve 9y ago
Because you reference AF447; Autopilot systems also added additional sensors (satellite assisted speed) for the system to have redundancies.

taneq 9y ago

All of those things have a team of engineers maintaining the hardware and configuration of each installation, and operate "on rails" (either GPS-defined or literal) in very carefully controlled environments. It's like saying that we've had factory robotics for decades and so we should soon have useful robotic housekeepers (in the general sense, not the Roomba sense).