Dr Damon:
Cavey the point of building this robobike is not to carry people. I am not going to go into any great detail because I do not have time but to ride a Moto GP bike with well over 200 bhp and capbable of speeds well in excess of 200mph takes an awful lot of skill, physical effort and a hell of lot of concentration. To get to the level of skill to ride one sucessfully takes years and years of practice and dedication.If Yamaha can build a robobike which is capable of beating the best humans in the world what does that tell you? They are already almost there. It is already capable of beating most of us mere mortals.
That tells me robots can make a far better job than any human even with something as complex as racing a GP bike. They can also do that without having a heart attack, losing their temper or getting fatigued.Do you see where it’s going? Over to you?
The technology for autonomous racing cars or even racing motorbike, while quite amazing, isn’t the biggest problems for those developing automated vehicles for road use. The biggest problem is getting it to interact safely with us, strange unpredictable humans, while we sort of accept road deaths and injuries from human controlled vehicles it’s unlikely that this will be accepted from autonomous vehicles.
I’m not just talking about autonomous vehicles sharing the roads with vehicles with drivers, actually they see that the first autonomous vehicles, especially trucks, will be used on in autonomous mode on motorways/highways, where traffic (should) be going the same direction and there aren’t pedestrians, cyclists and loads of junctions.
It would seem very probable for fully autonomous vehicles to actually work in the urban environment, it will require massive infrastructure changes to separate the autonomous vehicles from people and where this isn’t possible the speed of the vehicles will have to be reduced to very low levels. The problems is as humans we are not only unpredictable, but also will take advantage of our situation in an environment where vehicles are programmed to avoid a collision, so in a place with loads of pedestrians and cyclists you might find you autonomous vehicle comes to a standstill as each time it tries to move it has to avoid a person who knows it has to avoid them.
However large infrastructure changes have taken place in the past to accommodate new transport technology, the canal network was built to increase the speed and weight of goods moved inland, the rail network was built for similar reasons and also allowed people to move away from their places of employment and commute, and the Motorway network was built to supposedly allow rapid movement of people and freight.
As for the original link, like many of those articles, it has more to do with start up companies trying to attract shareholders or major industry buyers, as for this article published in Feb 2017, it made it look as the company had made some sort of break through, but Otto had already made it’s much publicised delivery of Beer, along a 120 miles of interstate, although the driver had to get it onto and off the Interstate and the truck was surrounded by Police and cars driven by Otto personal throughout the journey and the driver remained in the cab to take over control.
Why did Otto make this publicised run? Well Otto had been bought out by Uber and Uber is massively in debt and is reliant on its investors for its survival, publicity events like this keep them believing one day they will get their payout. However having seen some of the prices paid for these autonomous vehicles start-ups it reminds me of the Dot.com bubble.
From everything I’ve read and heard about autonomous trucks, at the moment most of the big players are working on Platooning technology and that will be with us very shortly, the fully autonomous, level 5, trucks are further away and as I said earlier might require infrastructure changes before it can be used universally, also the technology used for an autonomous car cannot be simply transferred onto a truck, the dynamic of a large goods vehicle are far different than they are for a car and that’s before we get into the social impact of mass automation of peoples jobs.
