Autonomy on Land and Sea and in the Air and Space Proceedings of a Forum (2018) / Chapter Skim
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1 Autonomy on Land and Sea and in the Air and Space
1 Autonomy on Land and Sea and in the Air and Space
Pages 1-19
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For this reason the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles could reduce motor vehicle fatalities by orders of magnitude, Rajkumar predicted, which would be "a big win for society." 1
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People deal with these and other unex pected situations by using reason, common sense, and even social norms, such as ways of communicating with other drivers. Autonomous vehicles have to use hardware and software to navigate through unexpected circumstances, but the hardware and software in a car can be tested in only a limited number of conditions.
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Or imagine scaling that to an entire country, and then globally." Engineers have made progress on all these issues, Rajkumar noted, "but there is still a much longer way to go." Counterintuitively, one barrier to the technology is the very high standards that autonomous vehicles must reach. Even the roughly 36,000 motor vehicle fatalities in the United States each year represent just one fatality for every 75 million miles driven, which is "a remarkably high bar for a technology.
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" Furthermore, he added, when an accident happens, "the media will be all over it, and we don't know what the social pushback will be." Autonomous vehicles are also likely to produce profound social dislocations. For example, most long-haul trucking is "a very logical candidate for automation." From a technical standpoint, the technology is almost ready, although uestions of training and regulation still need q to be addressed.
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Level 2: The driving mode-specific execution by one or more driver assistance systems of both steering and acceleration/deceleration using information about the driving environment and with the expectation that the human driver will perform all remaining aspects of the dynamic driving task. Level 3: The driving mode-specific performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task with the expectation that the human driver will respond appropriately to a request to intervene.
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Such jobs may eventually migrate to countries with lower labor costs, but then the laws of physics come into play, since a delay of several tens of milliseconds introduced by communicating with a distant operator could mean the difference between a vehicle stopping or driving off the road. Another possibility is that public transportation could be transformed in unanticipated ways.
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For example, cameras on underwater vehicles show that they are often surrounded by schools of fish, even in sharkinfested waters where such behavior would seem to pose risks. Beneath the surface, the ocean is a complex and changing environment characterized by currents, eddies, and vast quantities of life, much of which is poorly understood.
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They are being used in aquaculture, wind power, telecommunications, mineral extraction, and many other industries associated with marine environments. Some of the greatest unsolved questions surrounding the climate system involve the ocean.
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"When I have a vehicle at sea and it has a problem, and we finally figure out what we did wrong, I want to incorporate that back into the design space, so that the next vehicle incorporates those lessons." The design space includes the generation of computer code, he added, including automated code generation. Another consideration is that multiple devices are typically active in a marine environment, each working -- and in some cases learning -- on its own.
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"We're going to move gradually out of the terrestrial environment and into the ocean environment, and robotics will allow it to happen." IN THE AIR The airspace above the United States is regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration and divided into sectors, each monitored by an air traffic controller responsible for guiding aircraft so that they stay at least 5 nautical miles laterally and 1,000 feet vertically from other aircraft. Claire Tomlin, Charles A
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Together, changes in the system make this "an exciting time in air traffic control." Air traffic control is about to become even more demanding as companies develop new technologies that use the air space. For example, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
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"There's a lot of other air space functionality that air traffic control provides as a service to people who fly that needs to be understood. How do you do this?
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Communication with one in orbit around Saturn takes 74 to 84 minutes. "With those kinds of one-way light times, continuous, ground-in-the-loop, closed-communication control and navigation of spacecraft simply is not possible," said MiMi Aung, deputy division manager for autonomous systems at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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The landing of the Curiosity rover was the first autonomous soft landing ever done of a large vehicle. The next step will be precision landing, with autonomous systems deciding where to land and then setting down with pinpoint accuracy.
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With the Mars helicopter, a flight chamber with thin air cannot simultaneously simulate the lower gravity and atmospheric dynamics involved. Although simulations, modeling, and partial tests can increase confidence that a technology will work, Aung explained that the final test is in the Simulations, modeling, and mission itself, which requires time partial tests can increase confidence that a technology and funding.
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Vehicles could store data online, communicate information to what he called "cloudlets" built into the transportation infrastructure, or send data directly to a more broad-based cloud. At the same time, "I expect that vehicles will have the same requirement as aviation -- having a black box that records at least the past half hour and overwrites on top of that if there's a crash." In the air, tactical avoidance of collisions has to be done using realtime data processed by the vehicles.
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Some of the data from robots may come back to an operator in real time, which can allow an operator to decide what to do next, but "you often don't get all the data on the platform until you get the platform back." RADICAL INNOVATIONS Another broad topic of discussion concerned the many ways autonomous vehicles could transform aspects of the economy, society, and daily life. Rajkumar pointed out, for example, that cars are essentially steel cages to protect people from a crash.
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In air travel, people could go to an airport, say where they need to go, and the system would sell them a ticket on whatever airline would get them there. This would require a system, including an air traffic control system, that is "human-centric," said Tomlin.
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She is involved with a program called Girls in Engineering Oceans on planetary moons "have a lot to teach us about (supported by the National Science our oceans here on Earth," Foundation and private sector com- and their exploration "will be panies) , in which participants build done by robots." robots and their interest in engi- – James Bellingham neering.
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