Control Engineering

Paul Grayson

Social Engineering
January 7, 2008

WELCOMING NEW TECHNOLOGY
John Diebold, in his book, AUTOMATION, years ago suggested the best way to get people to accept a new technology is to demonstrate to them that it is not new after all.  To do this by showing them that it has been around for a long time, in an earlier form of what they see now.  We are going through that phase in the world of Driverless Cars right now.  Wikipedia  has compiled a long history indicating that driverless cars have been around since 1977.  That would mean that they have been around for 31 years, a decent length of time for a technology to gain street credit. The goal of saving lives on the worlds roads and highways, by making cars that are smarter,  is a cause that governments all around the world are taking up as their own.  As smart driverless cars become the politically correct solution to the wasteful loss of life on the worlds streets and highways, the companies that produce them are going to gather political support along the way and acceptance of driverless systems as an desirable technology.

DELIVERING THE SYSTEM
GM turned out a press release this morning in which it looks like they will be taking the lead in bring Driverless Cars to market and that it will take 7 years to develop them and another 3 years before you can buy them.  Luckily much of the technology a car company needs to make their cars state of the art is not produced by the car companies but is instead manufactured by special part suppliers.   GM could offer the high-tech things that other cars have on them simply by ordering those parts and installing them.  Parallel parking, stop and go cruise control, are things that GM cars don't have but could, if they wanted to.  Yes, GM's car won the DARPA Urban Challenge race, with five others not far benind, this was a race against the cars that ran but where are the three missing teams and their cars?  How would the GM car compare to those?  Why were they not in the race?  

DARPA TEAM MYSTERY
One of the facts the most auto industry reporters are ignoring is that three DARPA Grand Challenge teams, who were preparing for the first race, went missing in 2003.   The top three teams.  The three teams that were the farthest ahead of the other teams in developing their driverless systems went missing before final registration for the 2004 race.  Their websites disappeared, news coverage of their work ceased, and the members of the teams stopped chatting on the message boards.  I talked with one of the team leaders of a vanished team and he explained to me that while the prize for the first race was one million dollars, a Japanese car company had bought his team's car from the team for six million dollars and hired the team to build six more cars.  From others I heard that the same thing had happened to the other two vanished teams.  As Japanese car company employees, they were no longer free to talk to the press or about the developments they are making for their new employers.  If I recall correctly there have not been any Japanese car companys sponsoring any of the vehicles in the three DARPA races so I think something is going on we are not hearing about.

DRAW A LINE
In the past I have researched technologies which had gone underground for a while and it is not unreasonable to take their last known position and draw a straight line to estimate where they might be now.  In the case of the missing three teams that were bought by the Japanese car companies in 2003, lets look at where they started.  They were the three teams that were the farthest ahead.  Their vehicles were the ones nearest to completion.  The members of teams were working well together and had achieved their leading positions using limited resources. Now draw a line from there, five years long, toward a final goal of a producing a driverless production vehicle.  How close would you guess they are?  At the speed that these small, agile, talented, well working teams were progressing on limited resources, now supported by the large car companies that bought them, I would guess that they are already there - that they have arrived at the production version of the driverless system.  That puts them today 10 years ahead of GM's planned introduction date and merely waiting for attitudes to catch up with the technology available.  

http://newsday.com reader survey 1-8-08
Would you ride in a driverless car?
Yes (20 responses) 64.5%
No (7 responses) 22.6%
Maybe (4 responses) 12.9%
31 total responses (Results not scientific)

My informal stopping people at random and asking them a simmilar question showed slightly different results.  I have had 100% of the people I asked say that they would like to have a car that could drive itself and some ask me how soon I could install a conversion kit on their car. Take your own survey - ask the people you work with.  If there was a green button, the autodrive button, next to the blue button, OnStar, would they push the green button and settle back with their coffee and newspaper for the ride to work? 

Diagram from http://www.guidance.eu.com/factory_automation/agv_control.html

THE DEBATE
There has to be a debate, before any technology is accepted.  People have to have their chance to express their concerns about unions, insurance, liability, jobs, legislation, child safety, pedestrian safety, and so on.  Each technolgy introduced has had to go through this and in the end is accepted.   What we are seeing here is the convergence of many things that make it all possible now.  Self driving cars, busses, and trucks are just a natural evolution of the product. There are many compelling reasons to make ground vehicles drive themselves. Once everyone has had their say. Cars, busses and trucks will be driving themselves.  Some compromizes will be made along the way, perhaps like were made in the Railroad industry.  Firemen were no longer needed on locomotives when they went to diesel power, but firemen are still there.  They ride in the cab, have no coal to shovel or fires to stoke, but they are there, in the USA.  We may see drivers in cabs of self-driving trucks, no one knows yet what forces will prevail.   The regulation imposed on early automobiles that they be proceeded by a flag man to warn traffic of their approach is a rule long since abandoned.  You can expect that much of early regulations on self driving vehicles - which have yet to be written - will likely go the same way as the flag man rule. 

We live in interesting times. 

GO ROBOTS !

Paul F. Grayson - Chief Engineer
AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL MAGIC, LLC
Racing to build technology that saves soldier's lives.
390 4-Mile Rd. S.
Traverse City, MI 49686-8411
(231) 946-0187, (231) 883-4463 Cell
pgrayson@aimagic.org
http://aimagic.org
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/robotcluboftraversecitymi/
http://www.controleng.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=1180000318

Posted by Paul Grayson on January 7, 2008 | Comments (0)