The roadmap for self-driving cars

We sit here and we contemplate ageing: declines in eyesight, concentration, reaction times .. . We look at our ten year old Toyota Auris and wonder whether we should hold off on replacing it.

Wouldn't it be great to have an AI chauffeur, a level-5 self-driving car?

Rodney Brooks wrote this interesting essay last June (2017): Edge Cases For Self Driving Cars.

Here is how he starts:

"Perhaps through this essay I will get the bee out of my bonnet that fully driverless cars are a lot further off than many techies, much of the press, and even many auto executives seem to think. They will get here and human driving will probably disappear in the lifetimes of many people reading this, but it is not going to all happen in the blink of an eye as many expect. There are lots of details to be worked out."

He then proceeds to describe many edge cases. People naively think driving is a decoupled, modular activity. But this is not at all true: there are many kinds of activities all grouped under the one term 'driving'.

Motorway driving in good conditions with low traffic density can approximate a closed system, it's almost like a video game. On the other hand, driving through dense urban environments with parked cars, roadworks and with police officers directing traffic - perhaps in appalling weather conditions - requires all the abilities of a human being plus a good dose of common sense.

An AI that could do that would be an AGI, an artificial general intelligence. Naturally we don't have the first clue as to how to build one of those.

In the comments on Rodney Brooks's article, the discussion meanders to a discussion of future Uber cars - Uber is trying to reduce its costs by eliminating drivers and becoming an early adopter. But what happens when a Uber car encounters one of Brooks' edge cases?

Commentator Lawrence says:

"Wouldn’t Uber just have the option of 5G remote control built into all of their vehicles? Anytime something unexpected happens, or a rider requests, then the car is temporarily taken over by one of the bank of full-time human drivers employed in Uber’s remote control centre. Meanwhile the AI learns from how the human driver handles the problem."

Brooks replies,

"Yeah, I am guessing this will be part of the solution. It is a tried and true mechanism. Many years ago InTouch Health in Santa Barbara, with hundreds of deployed remote presence robots for doctors in distant US hospitals, had an operations center in Argentina. Operators there would take over the robots at night to make sure they were plugged in to the rechargers, do preventive maintenance etc.

Aethon in Pittsburgh, with tug robots deployed in hospitals around the US taking dirty bedding autonomously to the laundry, and used meal trays and dishes back to the kitchen, had a central operations center in Pittsburgh. I visited about 12 years ago. Whenever a robot got into trouble it would call the center and an operator would take control, looking through the cameras on board the tug to fix the problem.

Both these companies benefited from WiFi being pervasive in hospitals (for remote access to medical records from hand-helds) already – if they had had to get hospitals to install a network just for them I don’t think either could have overcome that hurdle. So using 5G for Ubers etc., makes sense. But see below.

Another case that I have seen, also on the order of 12 years or more ago, was in the port of Singapore, the world’s highest volume container port, stretching six miles along the coast of Singapore, which is remarkable for a country the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Many of the containers are getting switched between ships – it is a central switching node from many different Asian ports, for containers heading to North America and Europe, and so it is the hub of a hub and spoke mechanism shuffling containers to the right destinations. Most containers are only on the ground for 24 hours or so, stacked up quite a few high.

At the time an AI planner (written in Prolog!! – it is the ultimate blocks world after all) would say where each container had to go, and cranes on aerial rails would get them to and from ships and to and from the right ground stack. But the last few seconds of pickup and put down were done by a human who would be switched into the crane cameras and the accurately drive the crane’s position during the terminal few meters of the grasp for pickup, or the put down.

So yes, this may well be the sort of solution that a ride share company uses for difficult situations, and might be provided as a service for private owners of self driving cars. 5G is probably the right network. Tests start in 11 cities in the US this year. Will cover about 100 million people in the US by 2022. It will slowly, but eventually, fill out the tail over a few more years.

BUT, this will not be available in more than a few places by 2020, when many have predicted driverless cars will be well established and deployed. And besides the network there will be lots of other infrastructure and regulations to build out.

I am not saying that solutions will not be found an implemented eventually. I am saying that there are so many challenges (this is just one of many, many) that it is going to take a decade at least until we have even partial penetration, and many decades until it is the default."

To let a 'call-centre driver' reliably take over the driving of a stuck driverless car requires a high-coverage, high-bandwidth and very reliable network. As Brooks observes, nothing less than a full roll-out of the planned next generation 5G network will suffice.

But 5G is still a twinkle in the eyes of the designers: full roll-out of 5G in the UK is currently projected for c. 2030.

Don't hold your breath.

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But don't let the best be the enemy of the good. 'Driving' is such a diverse set of activities that the low-hanging fruit can be harvested decades before the full problem is solved. I expect jurisdictions of full automaticity to be in place by c. 2030. It might be possible to drive yourself to and from the motorway network, but once on it the machine takes over.

They'll have to build large parking areas near all the exits for those drivers who fail to take back control when prompted, though.

Our Toyota will be serving us for quite a few years yet, I suspect, crossed-fingers. Sadly.