Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/28/volvo_tests_project_sartre_on_public_roads/

by tomgallard • 14 years ago

127 55 14 years ago

question, since it wasn't answered in the article (I looked). do these cars tether to the truck electronically? I.e. is there a virtual leash/tow going on? Or do they use the truck as a guidepost? could they have driven without the truck? Did other cars cut in between them at any point?

Fascinating this whole move into self-driving vehicles though.

ralfd• 14 years ago

"Wirelessly streamed data from the lead vehicle tells each car when to accelerate, break and turn, all in real-world traffic conditions."

Seems like a wireless leash.

jacobr• 14 years ago

FTA

> On-board cameras, radar and laser tracking allow each vehicle to monitor the one in front. Wirelessly streamed data from the lead vehicle tells each car when to accelerate, break and turn, all in real-world traffic conditions.

tropin• 14 years ago

Is it legal to let cars self-drive in Spain?

mdhen• 14 years ago

They probably had drivers at the wheel to get around that.

confluence• 14 years ago

They have guys in the drivers seat like Google did I suppose. It's legal so long as someone has control.

unwind• 14 years ago

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUREKA_Prometheus_Project seems to indicate that trials/experiments have been on-going for many years, in various European countries. Perhaps it's a EU thing, so that Spain is included by default.

NLips• 14 years ago

When does a car become self-driving? I imagine that distance control is legal (i.e. cruise control where the car will brake and accelerate to maintain distance behind the car in front, up to a maximum speed), and this is a further extension with steering. There's still a person driving the truck at the front.

tomgallard2• 14 years ago

though lots of newer cars also have lane assist (so if you're drifting our of your lane without signalling, it will steer you back in).

I think it's becoming clearer that there's no strict dividing line between computer-driven and human-driven.

Rather, we'll slowly move to more and more being done by computer, and less and less done by the human (in this example- the computer taking over the motorway driving, and then handing over to you when its time to return to the normal roads).

This was also covered in the article about the Google car last week, which hands over to humans when it gets into a sticky/narrow situation.

arethuza• 14 years ago

"this is a further extension with steering"

Park assist is fairly common these days - which will steer your car into a parking space.

electrograv• 14 years ago

Self driving? Only if such a word can be applied to a laser beacon and wireless based follow-the-leader link. What happens if your radio link encounters interference? What happens if another car cuts in front of a robot car?

Obviously, all these self driven car stories are still ages behind google's AI car tech. I suppose it's unfair that google's car has spoiled the relative excitement of all these other stories, because they seem extraordinarily boring in comparison.

tomgallard2• 14 years ago

I imagine the Volvo engineers have done a lot of work on radio link interference / cutting up etc - just because they don't cover every eventuality in the article, doesn't mean they haven't thought of it!

w0utert4• 14 years ago

Genuinely curious: what is it that makes so many people have such high regards for Google's self-driving AI? I agree that it's a whole different ballgame compared to just tracking a lead vehicle on the motorway, but honestly, all I have seen from the Google self-driving cars have basically been hyped-up success stories and demo video's in extremely controlled and scripted environments. Nobody ever shows that video from less than a year ago where a Google AI car crashes into another car on their test track.

Yes, it appears the Google cars can drive around town 'autonomously' to some degree, yes, Google has facts to back up the number of miles travelled 'autonomously', but you never, ever get any facts from Google about how many times the human driver still had to intervene, how many times they had the software or hardware fail, how many situations the cars encountered that they could not handle.

To me, self-driving car achievements are still mostly PR. A car that can really, actually drive autonomously safely, anywhere, anytime, without any need for the drive to pay any attention at all, without requiring adapting all infrastructure, it's still a pipe dream and I think it will always be. Road infrastructure and traffic (especially city traffic with bikes and pedestrians) is simply too irregular and unpredictable to handle reliably by any form of AI known to man.

Personally, I think humanity will find a better way of transportation before the self-driving car will ever become a reality, as in: I can walk into a car dealership, buy a self-driving car, and have it drive me home safely while I read a newspaper, no matter where I live.

driax• 14 years ago

I have not heard of a Google AI Car crashing into another car. I have heard that one of the Google AI Cars was involved in a small crash (the other car crashed into the Google Car) while it was driven manually just outside Google's headquarters. Is that the incident you are referring to?

randomdata2• 14 years ago

I read in an article recently that Kinze is planning on releasing a fully autonomous agriculture planting machine by the end of this year. The field is certainly not the highway, but it is still neat to see the technology is already starting to becoming available for purchase (assuming they are able to deliver on their estimates).

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

Suppose there was a super HOV lane on your freeway where you were allowed to do 100mph in stead of 55mph and the distance between cars was 20ft instead of 300ft.

Would you buy one then ?

Would your local highway authority jump at the chance of getting 4x as many cars without building anymore infrastructure?

ccarpenterg• 14 years ago

It's not a self-driving car. Please change the title.

kbronson• 14 years ago

And how did they avoided the reckless spanish Guardia Civil? They are thirsty for anyone's money, and they won't be stopped by this "self-driving" crap. MULTA!

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

When the highway patrol cars came past the Volvos drove underneath the trailers of the big rigs and another rig overtook the first and hid them from view.

Just press the smokey-and-the-bandit button on the self drive console.

finnh• 14 years ago

This is a great notion for long distance road trips. It would be pretty nice when cruising cross-country to drift in behind an 18-wheeler and then read a book.

I think we'll get fully autonomous vehicles before this type of thing becomes common, but it's pleasant to envision a future where cars on the freeway form little spontaneous communities, with lead cars broadcasting "hey I'm headed here, hitch a ride" and others falling in behind.

Yes, I know there are a million ways a griefer could cause problems. Yes, I know that driving a car on the freeway in the middle of nowhere is one of the easier scenarios for a completely self-driven car, and no lead is necessary. I still think that self-organized caravans is a cool notion.

nosse• 14 years ago

I was little surprised at first about: "three cars behind the truck at an average separation of 6m". But this is probably an idea to lessen drag. It doesn't matter what powers our cars(gasoline, biofuel electricity), less is less, and we need all technology that can do it.

This is probably very important step towards self driving cars. Because some kind of commercial product will bring loads of money to the field, even if it's very basic.

yason• 14 years ago

The concept isn't new: planes have been landed automatically based on radio waves of the ILS system. But compared to a landing procedure on a single runway in a controlled space with necessary ground equipment to aid in the process, car traffic is not so much static.

The automatic following system will bump into fundamentals and the close proximity of the participating cars will only magnify their effect.

Consider a ten car "train" (or convoy) following the first car automatically. Their speed is higher than usual and they drive within a few meters of each other, all carefully controlled by a computer. Then the first car hits a big elk (moose).

The weight of the animal itself is sufficient to cause a significant, sudden decrease in the speed of the car body. While the sensors on the second car do notice that the first car slowed down (due to the impact), it cannot possibly brake to a stop without hitting the first car. If the convoy is driving 100 km/h no car is going to stop in time if the forecar loses a significant percentage of its speed in a short flash.

Now, what happened between the first and the second car will continue to propagate far back in the convoy and the end result is a pile of ten cars mostly crushed into each other.

Maybe there are no elk on a highway. Make it someone who had learned his driving skills on a Russian highway (you must have seen the Youtube videos). Or someone's tire blows up and that car spins to the adjacent lane straight in front of the first car.

But there's a good reason to have a speed-dependent 2-4 second safety margin between cars, and robotic controls and computerised radio links aren't going to change the physics.

Elhana• 14 years ago

I heard about similar tests with 2 cars, one following another and they were driving around different countries - they had issues in Russia as someone would occasionally slip in between them breaking the link.

Google research is much more interesting since car is independent, but much more demanding on a road data.

Too• 14 years ago

You don't even have to hit a sudden obstacle to get problems, trains of vehicles also add the problem of increased harmonics. Say the second car oscilates with +/-10cm from the desired length from the first car. How will this propagate to the last car if they all have the same controller, or if they all have different controllers? I know the uni here has been doing research about this exact problem in cooperation with volvo cars.

baddox• 14 years ago

The simple way to solve that is the same way human drivers are taught to solve this: by following at a safe distance. I was taught to follow at my own stopping distance, so that if the leading car were to hit a brick wall and stop immediately, I would still have time to stop myself.

jmileham• 14 years ago

I agree with you that this may not be revolutionary, but with some relatively realistic numbers (1300 kg lead car, a giant 1500 kg moose, 80kph road speed, 6m following distance, 7m/s^2 max decel of following vehicles), it looks like you'd only have the first two or three cars collide, and probably not hard enough to cause life threatening injuries in the second car. I'd think that tuning the following distance to the road speed (and, possibly more morbidly, the mass of the lead car relative to the foreseeable obstacles, which I'm not entirely sure that Volvo wasn't tacitly doing in the test) would be adequate to come up with a safe following distance well shorter than 2 seconds, where fuel economy gains obviously kick in as well.

The practical reaction time for mid-cruise humans is pretty terrifyingly slow sometimes. Pair that with suboptimal panic behavior and I believe that there's some significant efficiency and maybe even safety gains to be made. Granted, there is a limit.

forza• 14 years ago

Guess why the first car is a truck. Also Volvo is based in Sweden and have plenty of experience with elk. There's even two tests designed for elk[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_test

conanite• 14 years ago

The 6-metre distance between cars is probably to strongly discourage other drivers from attempting to cut in, which would banjax their laser finders and other stuff.

With the lead truck sending instructions, this is a client-server setup, compared to google's independent peer-to-peer approach. It's not self-driving, it's remote-control of a train of cars behind you. The volvo experiment seems much less ambitious than google's, and might be more successful in the narrow case of long-distance motorway travel. But I don't see how to generalise it to everyday driving.

Add an ad-hoc mesh network to google's cars and anything could become possible.

atleta• 14 years ago

It may not be that interesting for cars, but it is for trucks. A friend of mine is working on a similar system for trucks. The point there is that the group of trucks would actually behave as a train (and need only one driver, or at least the others could rest). The trucks this way could also drive closer to each other sparing on gas.

On the what happens when the leader car hits an elk scenario - the leader vehicle could (and probably does) transmit its own parameters (speed, acceleration, etc.).

jeza• 14 years ago

There's actually a proven and safe method to accomplish the same task, that has been occurring for centuries now. It works by having passengers wait on a platform, step onto a carriage then take a seat while the driver does all the work. Yeah, it's called a railway. :)

You can even take your car onto such a system (motor rail). While it's currently an expensive niche, perhaps prices would come down with greater utilisation. Indeed, if world oil prices should increase enough then it may well be cheaper load a bunch of vehicles onto a train and tow them along for long distances rather than drive them individually on roads.

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

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