FEBRUARY 2024 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
The era of the self-driving car is over for the moment.
Word came recently that Apple had closed its secret ten-year car initiative and reassigned engineers to other product lines in which products are actually shipping. This came weeks after General Motors took its much-hyped robotaxi experiment back to the drawing board.
I am sure that I was not the only engineer who was perplexed at the early on-road experiments that were attempting to arrive at an autonomous vehicle worthy of being out on the roads. Autonomous vehicles that could match the skill of the average human driver were thought to be 50 years away. Did the self-driving engineers know something we didn’t?
Now we have years of on-road experience with thousands of vehicles, and the verdict is that these on-road experiments were, at least, premature. A list of deaths, injuries, breakdowns, and head-scratching behaviors by self-driving cars have tarnished the reputation of the technology. In retrospect, it would have been better to keep the autonomous vehicles on the test track and in controlled industrial settings for another 10 or 20 years before trying them out on a mass scale on public roads.
The nature of the difficulty can be seen by looking at video of the rovers in action on Mars. A rover can pause or slow down at will. Most of the time, it is the only thing moving — nothing is moving around it. Navigating through traffic is another problem entirely. Obstacles are unpredictable and their meaning can be hard to understand, yet decisions have to be made in real time.
The effort to create self-driving cars has not been wasted and is likely to show up in augmented reality safety features for drivers. Features like lane assist and obstacle detection will make hazards more visible to drivers so that they can make better informed decisions. After engineers shake out the early problems in these enhanced safety features, they may then be ready for a new round of tests on self-driving technology.
At the same time, look for advances in slower-moving robots for cleaning, cutting the grass, and moving merchandise around a warehouse. Robots will master these controlled environments first.
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