Riding into the Future of Transportation.
What does the future of transportation look like? Will there be easier methods of travel for the average person? Will transportation be faster? Will transportation be cheaper? Will there be flying cars everywhere? Will humans need to travel to different planets for work?
Although it is hard to predict precisely what transportation may look like in the distant future, there are many forms of transportations that are in development today that will most likely be used in the near future by the average person. Although there are so many different ideas for transportation in the future, the transportation I think will affect the near future the most is self-driving cars.
One of the most common ideas for the future of transportation has been the idea of self-driving and autonomous cars. Even though most people may think this is a rather new concept, this idea has actually been around since before 1939, when it was first presented at the New York World’s Fair. At this fair, Norman Bel Geddes created the world’s first self-driving car. This vehicle was controlled using radio-controlled electromagnetic fields that were generated by magnetized spikes that were embedded in the roadway.
If self-driving cars were invented in 1939, why do we not have autonomous vehicles driving on the road today? This is because Norman Bel Geddes’s first self-driving car could only drive on roads with magnetized metal spikes embedded in the roads. This is highly impractical for many reasons. First off, you would have to rebuild every road to accommodate self-driving cars. This is way too expensive to even make this car a considerable option. In an urban city, it costs anywhere between $3 million to $5 million per mile to build a two-lane road. This doesn’t account for the price it would take to destroy a road and then redo the road, or the time it would take to rebuild every road in a single city. Second, everyone would need to be using self-driving cars. Norman Bel Geddes’s self-driving car can not avoid other, nonself-driving, vehicles so everyone would need to uniformly use his car for his version of autonomous vehicles to become practical.
So where are we with self-driving cars today? Self-driving cars are actually starting to look extremely promising today. Uber started working to create self-driving cars that the average person would be able to ride in during 2015. Although Uber has since sold their autonomous cars business to Aurora Innovations, they are still heavily invested in trying to make self-driving cars a reality for everyone.
Besides Uber, there have been many companies trying to get autonomous elements inside of all of their cars. From Tesla cars being able to self-park to Cadillac models being able to drive autonomously through pre-mapped highways, it is clear that self-driving cars are a goal that many companies are striving for.
I know what you are probably thinking right now, that this is cool and all, but you are wondering how this even works. But before I answer this question I will explain what the five layers of autonomy are.
Although the five layers of autonomy do not explain how self-driving cars will operate, they are good to know so you will be able to understand self-driving cars better. So first off, the five layers of autonomy are basically a scale of zero to five that is able to show how independent a car is capable of being from its driver.
The first level, or level zero, means that a car is completely dependent on a human to operate it.
The second level, or level one, states that certain systems are capable of being autonomous. These systems commonly include a cruise mode or an automatic brake for the car, which the car is able to control one at a time.
Level two on the five layers of autonomy means that a car can do two simultaneous actions autonomously. Although these cars are quite advanced, they still need a human operator to make sure nothing can go wrong.
Level three is that a car can perform all critical abilities of the car in certain environments or conditions. An example of this would be if a car was capable of driving itself perfectly as long as it was only straight roads or roads with tiny curves and bends in it. Although this sounds like a pretty impressive car for a lot of people, it still requires a driver to take over whenever the car is no longer in the perfect situation that it can drive-in.
Level fours is basically a better version of level three. Level four states that a car is self-driving in multiple situations, but not all of them. This would mean that a car is capable of driving itself in more situations than level three, but would still need a human driver to take control in the situations that it cannot drive itself.
So I am sure that most of you can probably predict what level five would be on this scale, but for those of you who can’t, it is a fully self-driving car. A fully self-driving car is exactly what you think it is. It is a car that needs absolutely zero human contact at all when you are riding in it.
Why did I choose to bring up the layers of autonomy? I wanted to explain how when people state that they are trying to build a self-driving car, they are referring to a level five on this scale. Every level on this scale, except for level zero, is technically a somewhat self-driving car, but it is important to be able to tell the difference between these levels, so you can further understand our progression with self-driving cars.
So now I will move on to explaining how these self-driving cars even work. These cars are able to tell where they are by their global positioning system, which is capable of working alongside their internal mapping database. This GPS gives the car the exact locations of where they are compared to the roads they are driving on. The car can also know where other objects are near them by utilizing radar-like sensors. These car’s GPSs sounds a lot like a GPS you might have on your phone, but they are built especially for self-driving cars. These cars require more advanced global positioning systems because the GPSs on our phones are always slightly off.
I am sure that you have seen your GPS tell you that you are 30 feet away from your turn, but you know that you are actually at your turn because there is no other turn in 30 feet. This is a very small error by your GPS that most people are able to just ignore because they know that GPSs can be a little bit inaccurate, but for cars, even a few inches can be the difference between passing a car and a car crash.
You might think that I am exaggerating with that point but I am not. Imagine if you had a blind-folded friend and you had to lead them through a maze, but you can only give vocal directions, and you cannot have them hit a wall. This is basically what is happening with the car. The car has no idea what is happening around it, it is just trusting whatever information it is receiving. In the case of your blind-folded friend, if you told them to take a sharper turn then they had to or you had them move a few feet further than they should, they could end up hitting the wall even though you were barely off with your directions.
Anyway, the map and sensors will then send inputs to its software so the car can process these inputs. The car will then make a path for it to go on, and then send a message to the car’s actuators, which controls the movement of the car. These actuators basically control different parts of the car such as the steering, acceleration, and breaking of the car while it is driving.
Besides just these inputs, there is clearly computer code that the car runs on, that explains what to do with the inputs it receives. This code basically includes things that all human drivers are trained to know. For example, this can be the fact that hitting another car is bad or the fact that the car should stop at red lights.
Self-driving cars are definitely looking like they are going to be a part of our future because of all of the advantages they have. A few of these advantages are the fact that they are safer than human drivers, faster than human drivers, and give human drivers time to relax when they are on the road. Self-driving cars are definitely going to be an integrated part of our world in the future.
