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As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different de

As Hamming suggested in "Art of doing science and engineering", when you want to make something autonomous, you usually have to build a completely different device that solves the same problem, rather than automating the same device. I wonder. For all the money thrown into self-driving cars research, could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? The technology for mostly-autonomous rail is well understood. Most of the financial cost is in infrastructure to support the system. Seems to me self-driving cars try to short-circuit that infrastructure build-up. They try to "automate the device" rather than "producing an automated system that solves the problem of moving people and goods". Specifically, I wonder if, for the cost and time spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out by now.

vishnugupta 5y ago
> build a completely different device that solves the same problem I realised this while discussing self-driving cars with my friends. I used example of Uber Eats. The problem statement is "I don't want to cook" and a reasonably acceptable solution IMO is cloud kitchens + delivery. As opposed to building a cooking robot. Cloud kitchens could automate 80% of repeatable stuff because it makes sense to solve that problem at scale.
- stcredzero 5y ago
  Why not optimize Blue Apron and HelloFresh style meal kits so that they involve even less labor, then distribute the production to local commercial kitchens? There are already businesses that package this kind of prep work for restaurants.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure you're just reinventing Domino's pasta line. Standardize the ovens you distribute around the world. Simplify food cooking so that its just "put this pre-cut prepared block of aluminum foil into the standard-temperature oven for 15 minutes", and "deliver".
    - stcredzero 5y ago
      You just reinvented it by taking what I was picturing about 3 steps further. Simplify food cooking so that its just "put this pre-cut prepared block of aluminum foil into the standard-temperature oven for 15 minutes", and "deliver". HelloFresh already has "kits" that get delivered, and later people more or less just place them into the oven on the provided aluminum foil trays.
dragontamer 5y ago
> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliable sensors that indicate where every train engine is on the rails. Given the huge amount of cargo any particular train has, I don't think there's any intent on cutting the last two humans (the conductor + engineer) out of their job. Their salary costs are miniscule compared to the safety value they deliver, even if the job of driving a train has been almost entirely automated away by now.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  I wonder if, for the cost spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-control-ptc https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-c... > On December 29, 2020, FRA announced that PTC technology is in operation on all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles, prior to the December 31, 2020 statutory deadline set forth by Congress. We got that. We literally got that.
    - sgrove 5y ago
      I suspect the OP may be more interested in nationwide, convenient, affordable, automated passenger rail. Which in the US is possibly (?) several orders of magnitude more in terms of capital investment compared to both electrifying the entire ICE fleet and automating it.
      - dragontamer 5y ago
whatshisface 5y ago
The labor saving advantages of carrying 100 people on the same vehicle are so enormous that there is little motivation if any to quit paying conductors and engineers.
- samstave 5y ago
  The profit motivation of having 100 people being required to buy gas is the anti-motivation in capitalist oligarchies
  - the_third_wave 5y ago
    That's not a valid argument given that it is just as feasible to price individual transport out of the market while simultaneously raising the price for public transport in such a "capitalist oligarchy". Fossil fuel companies will again go on a public transport buying spree, this time around with the intention of keeping the trains rolling while raising prices to the point of maximum profit.
zdragnar 5y ago
We could have possibly automated some existing rail, but I am not altogether certain that doing so would have lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency. Actually laying the infrastructure for mass transit via rail is an entirely different league of cost from what has been dumped into self driving cars. We have a hard enough time agreeing on how to do light rail transit in places that want it, and then actually getting it done.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  A self-driving streetcar, that only has 1 degree of freedom, might be a practical problem to solve and maybe if it existed we would not have had to go through the 90-day outage of VTA light rail service that the Bay Area just experienced, an experience which in all likelihood killed VTA light rail forever.
  - mynameisvlad 5y ago
    The VTA control building/center was badly damaged in the shooting that caused the outage you're talking about. Surely a fully automated light rail line would require everything in said building to likely be running at full capacity to work. Also, it was a result of a mass shooting. Have some tact.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    VTA restarted service a couple of days ago.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  I'm not altogether convinced that the money and effort spent on self-driving cars has led or will lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency either. Even if it does succeed, it seems to be about convenience anyway.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    If self driving succeeds, it is because it is safer than a human driver. If nothing else, it'll cut down on insurance premiums, and increase fuel efficiency by reducing speeding and unnecessary hard acceleration. There are also a lot more people currently driving than there are existing train drivers (which you can see I was comparing existing infrastructure) so the time tradeoff could easily lead to increased productivity, however you choose to measure it. All of this, of course, assumes fully autonomous driving. I'm somewhat sceptical that we'll actually get there, myself.
samstave 5y ago
I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions... Which networking protocol best maps to this? And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection... I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campuses and report that back to the city... And that's almost a decade old now... So apply the same but report the data back to the traffic management system which is also trained on all the traffic patterns for a given intersection to best optimize for their patterns...
- hamiltonkibbe 5y ago
  For the most part the MAC just looks for another signal on the wire (another train on the same section of rail) and when it looks clear, starts transmitting (driving). As you can imagine, there will be cases when 2 MACs start talking at the same time, at which point they detect the collision, wait a random delay and try again. I wouldn’t want to be on that train, I’d prefer plain old serial with hardware flow control
  - fanf2 5y ago
    Ethernet has not worked like that since the 1990s. Even WiFi avoids relying on collision detection by routing client-to-client traffic via the AP instead of being peer-to-peer.
- rini17 5y ago
  Large part of TCP is dealing with dropped packets. Presumably you don't want that to carry that over to rail/road traffic :)
  - samstave 5y ago
    HAHAH yes, I know -- I just didnt have a better example protocol... TCP is "ensuring the traffic gets there" -- not so much "ensuring no collisions" that was why I chose that one. Maybe BGP instead? "Route failed - go this way instead, as a backup"
HPsquared 5y ago
We could go the other way and have humanoid robot drivers that can get in and drive any car. Now that'd be difficult!
deeviant 5y ago
Rail is already highly autonomous with external monitoring systems integrated with vehicle control systems, but I'll just go on as if the distinction between what it is now and what are calling "autonomous" is significant. What problem does autonomous rail solve? The single driver is already a rounding error in total costs. Also, rail is already a controlled environment where collisions are much less likely to happen than road, so the fruit is much higher up the tree on that aspect too. It seems to me that bringing autonomy to rail would have little on it's bottom line.
fanf2 5y ago
The London Docklands Light Railway (DLR) has had fully automatic running since 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

vishnugupta 5y ago

> build a completely different device that solves the same problem I realised this while discussing self-driving cars with my friends. I used example of Uber Eats. The problem statement is "I don't want to cook" and a reasonably acceptable solution IMO is cloud kitchens + delivery. As opposed to building a cooking robot. Cloud kitchens could automate 80% of repeatable stuff because it makes sense to solve that problem at scale.

stcredzero 5y ago
Why not optimize Blue Apron and HelloFresh style meal kits so that they involve even less labor, then distribute the production to local commercial kitchens? There are already businesses that package this kind of prep work for restaurants.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're just reinventing Domino's pasta line. Standardize the ovens you distribute around the world. Simplify food cooking so that its just "put this pre-cut prepared block of aluminum foil into the standard-temperature oven for 15 minutes", and "deliver".
  - stcredzero 5y ago
    You just reinvented it by taking what I was picturing about 3 steps further. Simplify food cooking so that its just "put this pre-cut prepared block of aluminum foil into the standard-temperature oven for 15 minutes", and "deliver". HelloFresh already has "kits" that get delivered, and later people more or less just place them into the oven on the provided aluminum foil trays.

dragontamer 5y ago

> could we have had an autonomous rail system by now? We already have autonomous rail systems. Its called positive train control and was fully implemented like a year or two ago (mandated in 2009, but you know how government works, lol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control The train conductor has become more-and-more automated to remove the chance of human error. It works with a system of very reliable sensors that indicate where every train engine is on the rails. Given the huge amount of cargo any particular train has, I don't think there's any intent on cutting the last two humans (the conductor + engineer) out of their job. Their salary costs are miniscule compared to the safety value they deliver, even if the job of driving a train has been almost entirely automated away by now.

jvanderbot 5y ago
I wonder if, for the cost spent on CPU-and-engineer-driven research and development of autonomous cars, if we could have had nationwide autonomous rail rolled out.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-control-ptc https://railroads.dot.gov/train-control/ptc/positive-train-c... > On December 29, 2020, FRA announced that PTC technology is in operation on all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles, prior to the December 31, 2020 statutory deadline set forth by Congress. We got that. We literally got that.
  - sgrove 5y ago
    I suspect the OP may be more interested in nationwide, convenient, affordable, automated passenger rail. Which in the US is possibly (?) several orders of magnitude more in terms of capital investment compared to both electrifying the entire ICE fleet and automating it.
    - dragontamer 5y ago

whatshisface 5y ago

The labor saving advantages of carrying 100 people on the same vehicle are so enormous that there is little motivation if any to quit paying conductors and engineers.

samstave 5y ago
The profit motivation of having 100 people being required to buy gas is the anti-motivation in capitalist oligarchies
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  That's not a valid argument given that it is just as feasible to price individual transport out of the market while simultaneously raising the price for public transport in such a "capitalist oligarchy". Fossil fuel companies will again go on a public transport buying spree, this time around with the intention of keeping the trains rolling while raising prices to the point of maximum profit.

zdragnar 5y ago

We could have possibly automated some existing rail, but I am not altogether certain that doing so would have lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency. Actually laying the infrastructure for mass transit via rail is an entirely different league of cost from what has been dumped into self driving cars. We have a hard enough time agreeing on how to do light rail transit in places that want it, and then actually getting it done.

jeffbee 5y ago
A self-driving streetcar, that only has 1 degree of freedom, might be a practical problem to solve and maybe if it existed we would not have had to go through the 90-day outage of VTA light rail service that the Bay Area just experienced, an experience which in all likelihood killed VTA light rail forever.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  The VTA control building/center was badly damaged in the shooting that caused the outage you're talking about. Surely a fully automated light rail line would require everything in said building to likely be running at full capacity to work. Also, it was a result of a mass shooting. Have some tact.
- wumpus 5y ago
  VTA restarted service a couple of days ago.
jvanderbot 5y ago
I'm not altogether convinced that the money and effort spent on self-driving cars has led or will lead to any significant improvements in cost or efficiency either. Even if it does succeed, it seems to be about convenience anyway.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  If self driving succeeds, it is because it is safer than a human driver. If nothing else, it'll cut down on insurance premiums, and increase fuel efficiency by reducing speeding and unnecessary hard acceleration. There are also a lot more people currently driving than there are existing train drivers (which you can see I was comparing existing infrastructure) so the time tradeoff could easily lead to increased productivity, however you choose to measure it. All of this, of course, assumes fully autonomous driving. I'm somewhat sceptical that we'll actually get there, myself.

samstave 5y ago

I've always wondered if TCP and networking design could be applied to autonomous traffic... basically think of every car/train as a packet and ensure no collisions... Which networking protocol best maps to this? And what if we had smart traffic lights that were aware of every car in an surrounding area of an intersection... I mean FFS certain tech companies track all vehicles that drive by/near their corporate campuses and report that back to the city... And that's almost a decade old now... So apply the same but report the data back to the traffic management system which is also trained on all the traffic patterns for a given intersection to best optimize for their patterns...

hamiltonkibbe 5y ago
For the most part the MAC just looks for another signal on the wire (another train on the same section of rail) and when it looks clear, starts transmitting (driving). As you can imagine, there will be cases when 2 MACs start talking at the same time, at which point they detect the collision, wait a random delay and try again. I wouldn’t want to be on that train, I’d prefer plain old serial with hardware flow control
- fanf2 5y ago
  Ethernet has not worked like that since the 1990s. Even WiFi avoids relying on collision detection by routing client-to-client traffic via the AP instead of being peer-to-peer.
rini17 5y ago
Large part of TCP is dealing with dropped packets. Presumably you don't want that to carry that over to rail/road traffic :)
- samstave 5y ago
  HAHAH yes, I know -- I just didnt have a better example protocol... TCP is "ensuring the traffic gets there" -- not so much "ensuring no collisions" that was why I chose that one. Maybe BGP instead? "Route failed - go this way instead, as a backup"

HPsquared 5y ago

We could go the other way and have humanoid robot drivers that can get in and drive any car. Now that'd be difficult!

deeviant 5y ago

Rail is already highly autonomous with external monitoring systems integrated with vehicle control systems, but I'll just go on as if the distinction between what it is now and what are calling "autonomous" is significant. What problem does autonomous rail solve? The single driver is already a rounding error in total costs. Also, rail is already a controlled environment where collisions are much less likely to happen than road, so the fruit is much higher up the tree on that aspect too. It seems to me that bringing autonomy to rail would have little on it's bottom line.

fanf2 5y ago

The London Docklands Light Railway (DLR) has had fully automatic running since 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway