Showing posts with label Self-Driving Vehicles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self-Driving Vehicles. Show all posts

Monday, December 6

Diverless Cars


Self-driving vehicles are steadily becoming a reality despite the many hurdles still to be overcome – and they could change our world in some unexpected ways.

It's a late night in the Metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. Under the artificial glare of street lamps, a car can be seen slowly approaching. Active sensors on the vehicle radiate a low hum. A green and blue 'W' glows from the windscreen, giving off just enough light to see inside – to a completely empty driver seat.

The wheel navigates the curb steadily, parking as an arrival notification pings on the phone of the person waiting for it. When they open the door to climb inside, a voice greets them over the vehicle's sound system. "Good evening, this car is all yours – with no one upfront," it says.

This is a Waymo One robotaxi, hailed just 10 minutes ago using an app. The open use of this service to the public, slowly expanding across the US, is one of the many developments signalling that driverless technology is truly becoming a part of our lives.

The promise of driverless technology has long been enticing. It has the potential to transform our experience of commuting and long journeys, take people out of high-risk working environments and streamline our industries. It's key to helping us build the cities of the future, where our reliance and relationship with cars are redefined – lowering carbon emissions and paving the way for more sustainable ways of living. 

And it could make our travel safer. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. "We want safer roads and less fatalities. Automation ultimately could provide that," says Camilla Fowler, head of automated transport for the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).  READ MORE...


Monday, October 18

Self-driving Cars

Residents in a "dead-end" street in San Francisco say they are being plagued by an influx of self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous-driving firm Waymo's cars have been going up and down the cul-de-sac at all hours "for weeks", according to local news station KPIX.

Residents say vehicles sometimes have to queue before making multi-point turns to leave the way they came.

Waymo says the vehicles are just "obeying road rules" designed to limit traffic in certain residential streets.

"There are some days where it can be up to 50," Jennifer King told KPIX. "It's literally every five minutes. And we're all working from home, so this is what we hear."

She said the human "safety drivers" supervising the automated cars "don't have much to say other than the car is programmed and they're just doing their job".

A spokesman for Waymo said the cars sometimes made a detour because of the presence nearby of one of San Francisco's "slow streets", which aim to limit traffic in certain residential areas.

"We continually adjust to dynamic San Francisco road rules. In this case, cars travelling north of California on 15th Avenue have to take a u-turn due to the presence of 'slow streets' signage on Lake," the company said.  READ MORE...