From home automation to self driving cars, is this advanced technology within our reach?

Home automation took us by storm in 2018 with the Apple HomePod and fast tracked home automation technology but as we fast forward to our near future of self-driving cars. How much harder will crossing the line from assisted driving to fully autonomous vehicles really be? 

Think of a future in which you climb into a car, take out your phone, and type (or better yet, speak) your destination to your car like any other person on WhatsApp? Then, like something out of a science fiction novel, your fully autonomous vehicle safely and efficiently drives you there while you catch up on the latest news, watch a film, or browse through your phone.

Since the very first roads were paved in the early 1900s, a fully autonomous vehicle or AV has been the ultimate vision of engineers and innovators seeking to update and evolve how we understand transportation and traffic. From horse-drawn carriages to driverless electric vehicles, the leap in technology continues to grow exponentially.

The truth is AVs will likely change the way we understand transportation sooner than we realise.

How it started

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clark

Driverless cars have been tested and improved upon by multiple corporations such as Tesla, Audi, Ford, Apple and Huawei. Since 2009, Google Ltd. has also conjointly been involved in the self-driving project. The initial goal was to style a navigation program that took full control over a passenger vehicle and drove over ten uninterrupted 100-mile routes to put their prototype concept through its paces.

After years of development, Waymo, a corporation focused on developing self-driving cars into a ride along service became a subsidiary of Google in 2016. Since the handover was completed, Waymo has gone public with its trial of 600 vehicles throughout the United States. Inviting members of the public to test their vehicles fully operated by the automated System. 

From celebrities to social media influencers, the feedback has been phenomenal. Although eerie at first, the experience of sitting in the back seat and watching the steering wheel turn itself down the highway is beyond exciting. Within a few minutes, most people forget that the vehicle is completely autonomous and enjoy the ride along service.

How it works

Essentially, AVs utilise technology that replaces assisted driving features such as park assist. The system makes use of a mixture of vehicle sensors, cameras, lidar (laser radar), radar, and GPS to define the terrain and keep track of real-time changes to the condition of roads and driveways.

These features are integrated into the driverless system which runs thousands of instant simulations to calculate the safest, most efficient pathing from point A to point B. These AV systems accumulate over one million hours of driving experience both through real-time driving experience and virtual simulations.

Safety concerns

Since 90% of all road accidents are caused by human driver error, the advent of AVs comes with the expectations that they need to be safer to pour into mainstream transportation. This is because driverless AI systems don't get drunk or high, drive at excessive speeds, or take unnecessary risks which is something people do all the time.

With a fully automated system, there is every reason to believe that AVs will reduce the severity of accidents and perhaps even cause a dramatic significant reduction in insurance premiums.

Why should I trust AVs?

We seem to have this assumption that we are generally better at performing tasks than we really are. When asked, most people ultimately think they are good drivers with surveys showing that 74% of people think they are above-average drivers. Do you believe them?

Human beings only have two eyes and intuition, whereas AVs have a host of observational equipment which allows them to pinpoint moving objects from 300 meters away and plot a course based on predictive pathing allowing for split-second decision making. The system also provides a seamless transition from driverless to manual operation should the need arise.

Automotive acclimation through the decades

Before the 1940s, almost all elevators were run and managed by human drivers. When engineers started developing driverless elevators the public understandably became concerned. Some even refuse to use them at all. It wasn't until New York City's novel elevator driver strike did companies start adopting them en masse. To the point where today we see the concept of someone driving an elevator as absurd.

However, driving a car is more complicated than managing one-dimensional travel through vertical shafts. When it comes to extremely tough navigational situations we generally expect humans to be more equipped to handle them than computer systems. However, aeroplanes are also extensively controlled by computers to the point where most landings aren't even controlled by pilots anymore. They call this the CAT III Auto Landing Procedure.

Now, the obvious question is: why shouldn't this be extended to cars?

Software over human input

The ultimate question on everyone's mind is that if these vehicles are better than the average driver, then ethically speaking, we should be pushing to roll them out as quickly as possible. So how do we go about proving this?

"We would never launch a rider-only service if it did not meet that basis for a safety framework," says Leticia Cavalcante, Head of Operations at Waymo. "We are working hard to expand the rollout of these systems. This is why we accumulate driver experience to prove to regulators that it's so much safer."

The driving system has far more experience than the average driver, thanks to accumulated data of over 35 million kilometres of public roads. It would take one person over 1000 years to match that level of experience. And what's more, all the data collected is used to train the systems, fix software bugs, and even manage all the vehicles in the fleet.

Data analysis 

In 2019, Waymo released a study of its data collected over 10 million kilometres of driving in downtown Phoenix Arizona. Of the 18 recorded accidents, none of them were serious enough to cause any bodily injury to passengers. Waymo has reported that some types of accidents have been eliminated entirely. These include hitting stationary objects and veering off-road. 

Of the 18 accidents, there were three incidents of Waymo vehicles involving pedestrians. In all three of those incidents, the AV was stationary: the pedestrians all ran into the vehicle.

A lot of the real-world data that is collected is used to tweak and create scenarios within their system. For example, what would the system do if a cyclist veered into the road? or how it handled human driver error? As such, the software has been trained on an additional 35 billion kilometres of roadway in simulations accounting for almost all possible scenarios.

Driverless cars coming to South Africa?

At this stage, South Africans looking for a first-hand AV experience are likely to head for driver assisted vehicles that already utilise this technology. These include brands such as Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi, Volvo, Kia, Hyundai, Opel, and Honda to name a few. 

As of today, no AVs are operating within South Africa. However, the government plans to draw up a legal framework to accommodate for their eventual arrival. In a 2019 interview with the previous Transport Minister, Blade Nzimande, he posited that there are plans to implement laws to govern AVs but they are not an immediate concern.

Testing in the country remains off the books since no vehicles are currently allowed to drive on our roads without a driver. However, should the government begin the process of formally drawing up a legal framework they would borrow from existing legal guidelines of countries pioneering the concept? As such, quick implementation would occur but until then, legislation remains untouched.

Looking to the horizon, AVs aren't necessarily scheduled to be part of day-to-day road traffic any time soon. However, with government legislation taking shape along the lines of European and American standards, we are likely to see a massive uptick in interest within the next decade.

Prospects for the future

Although a full transition to AVs is on the horizon, the substantial impact they will have on services such as taxis services and transport for the disabled creates potentially new avenues for business innovation. 

Whether we see AVs take over five or twenty years from now, should development continue at the current pace, we're likely to see a fully overhauled system of transportation in the not too distant future.

Read our previous article here: ​​https://www.hamiltons.co.za/news/property-trends-discovering-the-how-and-why-behind-semigration/?c=news 

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