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Safety is a far more likely concern.
by codingdave 1y ago
Safety is a far more likely concern.
- Loughla 1y agoI'm not sure about that. A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles. There are only well established obstacles, no pedestrians, and straight lines for large distances. Source: autosteer on JD tractors let me get really good at switch games.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoNot only that, but if a tractor encounters an obstacle in the field that it doesn't know what to do about, it can simply stop right where it is and wait for human intervention, unlike cars where you don't want them stopping dead in the middle of the road. Also tractor speeds in fields are far lower than cars on roads, so automatically a huge safety advantage there.
- lokar 1y agoI agree, it’s private property not open to the public. As long as the owner assumes responsibility for injuries it should be fine. Perhaps some updated osha rules, I assume they have rules for existing equipment.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoUntil you get to the end of the field. If a malfunction means you don't turn or stop, the next thing in front of you might be a house, a school, or a highway. Today's farm tractors are powerful, heavy machines that can plow right through a lot of obstacles. I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch. That could be someone watching a bunch of tractors remotely on monitors.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoI mean a GPS geo-fence is pretty simple and fail safe. I'm more worried about something like humans unexpectedly in the field. Imagine a migrant crossing a field and getting run over by a combine.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoYeah, that's a concern too. I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance? I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.
- ccozan 1y agoBut I expect a autonomous tractor - like an auto - to have a radar and be able to stop if an obstacle is there - not only migrants, how about wild animals, etc.
- pfdietz 1y agoA GPS-driven cutoff seems like an obvious thing to have in this situation, no?
- nradov 1y agoGPS (or GNSS in general) is hardly sufficient for anything safety critical. The signals are very weak and can easily be spoofed or jammed. Even overhead obstructions like trees and buildings nearby can cause significant offsets due to multipath reflection issues.
- zdragnar 1y agoRTK driven tractors are not using just standard GPS. They have positional accuracy down to one inch.
- immibis 1y agoSimple solution for that. If you jam GPS and it makes an autonomous tractor run over a school, you're liable for the manslaughter of the school kids. Trains can be derailed, but they're still allowed to operate and we just put the derailer in prison. And knives can be used to stab people. And someone can even grab your arm and force you to stab someone with the knife, and the law understands this.
- nradov 1y agoWhat a stupid "solution". It is almost never possible to catch GNSS jammer users after the fact. GPS alone can never be sufficient, regardless of the legal issues. There are automated technical solutions to this problem involving sensor fusion and/or ground beacons.
- pfdietz 1y agoSimply jamming the GPS would cause the vehicle to stop. What would be needed would be spoofing the GPS to make the vehicle think it was still operating normally, in the field it was supposed to be in, without any detectable quirks, a much harder task.
- tonyhart7 1y agoseems like someone didnt playing autonomous drone before, its a solved problem and Yes we do have OSS tool for that
- bryanlarsen 1y agoWe even had solutions for that in the 70's when the law in question was written. But the solutions available at the time were far from fool-proof.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch This is the sort of feel-good rule making that stifles an economy. Driverless tractors exist. They’ve been deployed across the world. We have real-world data about their safety and precisely zero cases where they ran into schools because they got lost. There is a legitimate safety debate that can be had. But it should pit data against data, not hypotheticals.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> A field is sort of a best case scenario for autonomous vehicles There is no “autonomous tractor law”, the headline is misleading. There is a farm safety law that has been in place since long before any autonomous production farm equipment existed which prohibits self-propelled equipment without the operator seat occupied at all times while in operation. It was not unheard of for people to get on and off low-speed self-propelled (that was not self-driving) farm equipment while in operation, in an attempt at efficiency/multitasking, with attendant safety risks. That’s what the law was directed at.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoAlso, it's useful to remember that before tractors, there were horses, and the equipment pulled by horses was gradually converted to tractors. With horses, the farmer might sit on the equipment and use reins, or he might walk in front of the horses and lead them. Either way, he had control of them without literally sitting on them. So when the first tractors came along, it probably wasn't automatic to think you needed to sit directly on it. And it was a lot easier to hop on and off them when they were small machines without cabs. They were pretty dangerous, really, with little in the way of safety protection over moving parts, so I can see why people thought a rule was needed to keep the driver on the seat.