Showing posts with label Autonomy and Complacency; Intelligent Transportation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Autonomy and Complacency; Intelligent Transportation. Show all posts

Artificial Intelligence - How Do Autonomous Vehicles Leverage AI?




Using a virtual driver system, driverless automobiles and trucks, also known as self-driving or autonomous vehicles, are capable of moving through settings with little or no human control.

A virtual driver system is a set of characteristics and capabilities that augment or replicate the actions of an absent driver to the point that, at the maximum degree of autonomy, the driver may not even be present.

Diverse technology uses, restricting circumstances, and categorization methods make reaching an agreement on what defines a driverless car difficult.

A semiautonomous system, in general, is one in which the human performs certain driving functions (such as lane maintaining) while others are performed autonomously (such as acceleration and deceleration).

All driving activities are autonomous only under certain circumstances in a conditionally autonomous system.

All driving duties are automated in a fully autonomous system.

Automobile manufacturers, technology businesses, automotive suppliers, and universities are all testing and developing applications.

Each builder's car or system, as well as the technical road that led to it, demonstrates a diverse range of technological answers to the challenge of developing a virtual driving system.

Ambiguities exist at the level of defining circumstances, so that a same technological system may be characterized in a variety of ways depending on factors such as location, speed, weather, traffic density, human attention, and infrastructure.

When individual driving duties are operationalized for feature development and context plays a role in developing solutions, more complexity is generated (such as connected vehicles, smart cities, and regulatory environment).

Because of this complication, producing driverless cars often necessitates collaboration across several roles and disciplines of study, such as hardware and software engineering, ergonomics, user experience, legal and regulatory, city planning, and ethics.

The development of self-driving automobiles is both a technical and a socio-cultural enterprise.

The distribution of mobility tasks across an array of equipment to collectively perform a variety of activities such as assessing driver intent, sensing the environment, distinguishing objects, mapping and wayfinding, and safety management are among the technical problems of engineering a virtual driver system.

LIDAR, radar, computer vision, global positioning, odometry, and sonar are among the hardware and software components of a virtual driving system.

There are many approaches to solving discrete autonomous movement problems.

With cameras, maps, and sensors, sensing and processing can be centralized in the vehicle, or it can be distributed throughout the environment and across other vehicles, as with intelligent infrastructure and V2X (vehicle to everything) capability.

The burden and scope of this processing—and the scale of the problems to be solved—are closely related to the expected level of human attention and intervention, and as a result, the most frequently referenced classification of driverless capability is formally structured along the lines of human attentional demands and intervention requirements by the Society of Automotive Engineers, and has been adopted in 2 years.

These companies use various levels of driver automation, ranging from Level 0 to Level 5.

Level 0 refers to no automation, which means the human driver is solely responsible for longitudinal and latitudinal control (steering) (acceleration and deceleration).

On Level 0, the human driver is in charge of keeping an eye on the environment and reacting to any unexpected safety hazards.

Automated systems that take control of longitudinal or latitudinal control are classified as Level 1, or driver aid.

The driver is in charge of observation and intervention.

Level 2 denotes partial automation, in which the virtual driver system is in charge of both lateral and longitudinal control.

The human driver is deemed to be in the loop, which means that they are in charge of monitoring the environment and acting in the event of a safety-related emergency.

Level 2 capability has not yet been achieved by commercially available systems.

The monitoring capabilities of the virtual driving system distinguishes Level 3 conditional autonomy from Level 2.

At this stage, the human driver may be disconnected from the surroundings and depend on the autonomous system to keep track of it.

The person is required to react to calls for assistance in a range of situations, such as during severe weather or in construction zones.

A navigation system (e.g., GPS) is not required at this level.

To operate at Level 2 or Level 3, a vehicle does not need a map or a specific destination.

A human driver is not needed to react to a request for intervention at Level 4, often known as high automation.

The virtual driving system is in charge of navigation, locomotion, and monitoring.

When a specific condition cannot be satisfied, such as when a navigation destination is obstructed, it may request that a driver intervene.

If the human driver does not choose to interfere, the system may safely stop or redirect based on the engineering approach.

The classification of this situation is based on standards of safe driving, which are established not only by technical competence and environmental circumstances, but also by legal and regulatory agreements and lawsuit tolerance.

Level 5 autonomy, often known as complete automation, refers to a vehicle that is capable of doing all driving activities in any situation that a human driver could handle.

Although Level 4 and Level 5 systems do not need the presence of a person, they still necessitate substantial technological and social cooperation.

While efforts to construct autonomous vehicles date back to the 1920s, Leonardo Da Vinci is credited with the concept of a self-propelled cart.

In his 1939 New York World's Fair Futurama display, Norman Bel Geddes envisaged a smart metropolis of the future inhabited by self-driving automobiles.

Automobiles, according to Bel Geddes, will be outfitted with "technology that would rectify the mistakes of human drivers" by 1960.

General Motors popularized the concept of smart infrastructure in the 1950s by building a "automated highway" with steering-assist circuits.

In 1960, the business tested a working prototype car, but owing to the expensive expense of infrastructure, it quickly moved its focus from smart cities to smart autos.

A team lead by Sadayuki Tsugawa of Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory in Japan created an early prototype of an autonomous car.

Their 1977 vehicle operated under predefined environmental conditions dictated by lateral guiding rails.

The truck used cameras to track the rails, and most of the processing equipment was aboard.

The EUREKA (European Research Organization) pooled money and experience in the 1980s to enhance the state-of-the-art in cameras and processing for autonomous cars.

Simultaneously, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania pooled their resources for research on autonomous navigation utilizing GPS data.

Since then, automakers including General Motors, Tesla, and Ford Motor Company, as well as technology firms like ARGO AI and Waymo, have been working on autonomous cars or critical components.

The technology is becoming less dependent on very limited circumstances and more adaptable to real-world scenarios.

Manufacturers are currently producing Level 4 autonomous test cars, and testing are being undertaken in real-world traffic and weather situations.

Commercially accessible Level 4 self-driving cars are still a long way off.

There are supporters and opponents of autonomous driving.

Supporters point to a number of benefits that address social problems, environmental concerns, efficiency, and safety.

The provision of mobility services and a degree of autonomy to those who do not already have access, such as those with disabilities (e.g., blindness or motor function impairment) or those who are unable to drive, such as the elderly and children, is one such social benefit.

The capacity to decrease fuel economy by managing acceleration and braking has environmental benefits.

Because networked cars may go bumper to bumper and are routed according to traffic optimization algorithms, congestion is expected to be reduced.

Finally, self-driving vehicles have the potential to be safer.

They may be able to handle complicated information more quickly and thoroughly than human drivers, resulting in fewer collisions.

Self-driving car negative repercussions may be included in any of these areas.

In terms of society, driverless cars may limit access to mobility and municipal services.

Autonomous mobility may be heavily regulated, costly, or limited to places that are inaccessible to low-income commuters.

Non-networked or manually operated cars might be kept out of intelligent geo-fenced municipal infrastructure.

Furthermore, if no adult or responsible human party is present during transportation, autonomous automobiles may pose a safety concern for some susceptible passengers, such as children.

Greater convenience may have environmental consequences.

Drivers may sleep or work while driving autonomously, which may have the unintended consequence of extending commutes and worsening traffic congestion.

Another security issue is widespread vehicle hacking, which could bring individual automobiles and trucks, or even a whole city, to a halt. 


~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.


See also: 


Accidents and Risk Assessment; Autonomous and Semiautonomous Systems; Autonomy and Complacency; Intelligent Transportation; Trolley Problem.


Further Reading:


Antsaklis, Panos J., Kevin M. Passino, and Shyh J. Wang. 1991. “An Introduction to Autonomous Control Systems.” IEEE Control Systems Magazine 11, no. 4: 5–13.

Bel Geddes, Norman. 1940. Magic Motorways. New York: Random House.

Bimbraw, Keshav. 2015. “Autonomous Cars: Past, Present, and Future—A Review of the Developments in the Last Century, the Present Scenario, and the Expected Future of Autonomous Vehicle Technology.” In ICINCO: 2015—12th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, vol. 1, 191–98. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

Kröger, Fabian. 2016. “Automated Driving in Its Social, Historical and Cultural Contexts.” In Autonomous Driving, edited by Markus Maurer, J. Christian Gerdes, Barbara Lenz, and Hermann Winner, 41–68. Berlin: Springer.

Lin, Patrick. 2016. “Why Ethics Matters for Autonomous Cars.” In Autonomous Driving, edited by Markus Maurer, J. Christian Gerdes, Barbara Lenz, and Hermann Winner, 69–85. Berlin: Springer.

Weber, Marc. 2014. “Where To? A History of Autonomous Vehicles.” Computer History Museum. https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/where-to-a-history-of-autonomous-vehicles/.


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