Last week I was in the 2017 edition of VLCSofting Congress which organizes the ITI in Valencia. This is the second time I’ve been to this congress as rapporteur, and the truth is that I think it’s going to turn into a good reference in the city for the technical level of the talks and of the speakers who attend the event. This year, for example, there was a talk of Google and another Microsoft I’m just as interesting… except mine, of course. The next talk during 2018 will be titled
‘Car Hacking ‘and we’ll get a little more into matter.
On this occasion, my talk was called «Trolls and autonomous cars. «It’s not the original title since I wanted to call you ‘Bullying to autonomous cars‘, but finally my wife (a saint, hear) made me see that that title was too aggressive and could be offensive: D The main idea of the talk was to place on the ‘state of art’ of autonomous cars Today, because, even if we do not see them for the moment in Spain, in other cities of the world there are already self-employed vehicles in practice and learning from the environment, so in cities like San Francisco for example it is beginning to become common to see
a car where the driver does not carry his hands on the steering wheel (they are not yet fully self-contained without anyone behind the steering wheel):
What characteristics should an autonomous car have?
First of all, we’re talking about what an autonomous car really is. And no, it’s none of this:
The three conditions that you must gather a car so that we can define it as autonomous are these:
And obviously, there are different levels of autonomy. There are several platforms where we try to list these levels, but it seems that the most widespread to date is the one created by the National Road Traffic Safety Administrationwhich defines these levels:
Although it seems a lie from our point of view, there are some manufacturers who have cars with level 4 autonomy around the corner, for example these three:
This means that by the end of the year we can see already Theslas level 4 running through the streets! No driver! In Spain we are still a little far from this as legislation does not allow it, but little by little we will see changes in this legislation and how these cars are coming to our streets. It is more, though end of year we can start seeing level 4 vehicles, the people of Tesla say they will show how one of their Teslas is able to go from San Francisco to New York with a level 5 of autonomy, which means that they will have to be able to replenish (or charge the
batteries) autonomously along the way (https: / / www.theverge.com / 2016 / 10 / 19 / 13341100 / tesla-self-driving-autonomous-road-trip-la-nyc). And you’ll wonder, why is Tesla possible to do this but the rest of the manufacturers don’t? Obviously because of the type of ‘gas stations’ that each uses, Tesla has been preparing her Super Loaders and to distribute them to different cities by the time this moment is possible.
Technology risks
After this small introduction to be placed, we were talking about the risks that the new technology (I don’t know if you know it, but every time someone says’ new technologies’ to refer to technologies that have been with us for over 20 years, God kills a kitten). Currently, car manufacturers take about 5 years to develop and test a new technology until they reach the street within reach of anyone. However, with the new processors to incorporate vehicles and associated software, this cannot be the case. Both hardware and the
IT security canisms that we were in 5 years ago have changed COMPLETELY and what 5 years ago was safe today is a possible vector of attack because vulnerabilities have been discovered. In addition, the inherent risks must be taken into account (we are no longer going to enter the moral and ethical issues if your car would throw you down a ravine before crashing into a school bus), but the current technology problems related to intra-vehicle networks (V2V and V2I), the new WiFi standard IEEE 802.11-p or artificial vision q
e prevents the current cameras from being able to differentiate when the image shown is from another car or our same car in a mirror:
What is clear is that self-employed vehicles will come in the coming years to completely change the concept we have of cities and roads. For example, it will no longer be necessary to extend the roads as our self-employed vehicles will be able to move more efficient:
This image would be a temerity on a public track where we must respect a safety distance in case we have to react, but with the autonomous cars it will no longer be necessary to keep that distance… not only because the car is able to react much faster if the front one stops, but because, in addition, being connected to the other cars, it will know that 7 cars later have started to stop.
It has to be said that speed radars will no longer be necessary. (oohoo!). In return, we will have to suffer the period of ‘adaptation’, living with 1.0 drivers and self-employed cars for a few years, which is not going to be easy and will allow us things like disturbing an self-employed car to stop or separate:
Finally, what seems to be achieved in a few years’ time is to reach a model of for-use with several integrated actors, being a company like Tesla in charge of the engine part and batteries, someone like Apple in charge of comfort and interaction with the user, Google putting ‘the brain‘to correct all the data from the autonomous part of the vehicle (let us remember that an autonomous vehicle is capable of generating about 600 Gbps of information) and finally a company like Uber so that it is possible to request the car you need at every moment and appear at the door of your home or office to the
c minutes, something like this:
And well, basically these are the main ideas I presented during my talk. The feedback of the people was very good, there was laughter during my presentation and several people congratulated me on the slides, so objective achieved:) Just show you one last slide on a possibility of the self-employed cars that you had not thought so far… the one to go looking at the road or reading as you move to work seems clear, but to make the most of the way to take advantage of that time of the last image?: D
