Self Driving Dream

U.S. Air Force photo/Maj. David Kurle

Self driving cars attract attention. Equipped with technology marvels (smartphones) in their hands, cruising at 30000 feet in reclining armchairs at 500mph while sipping champagne, people think (or really believe) that everything's possible. And, as an example, cars will drive themselves without human assistance on public roads pretty soon.

As British would put it "I hear what they are saying..." and "that is very interesting". In short: I doubt this will happen anytime soon. I made my opinion clear back in 2011 , and nothing has materially changed since then.

Fully autonomous cars in an uncontrolled environment (read: public roads) are insanely difficult thing to achieve. Yes, they can navigate Palo Alto, CA or Phoenix, AZ, at crawling speeds. Or they can ride down a lane on a highway. But any time an unexpected obstacle appears in front of them, they will slam head-on into that, killing the passengers.

None of the self driving systems designed today is capable of reliably detecting an obstacle at 50mph. So they are all programmed to ignore them, in order to avoid false positives (i.e., slamming on brakes every couple of seconds). Which works most of the time, but ends up tragically if such encounter takes place.

There is a fundamental reason for that: lidar scanners, which are the eyes of a self driving car, do not have range and resolution sufficient to reliably detect an object 150 or more meters—away. Camera—based image recognition is far from reaching that goal too. The same limitation applies to a car that wants to merge into traffic moving at highway speed - it needs to see the other cars that are 6 to 10 seconds—or 180 to 300 meters—away. Not possible today, nor anytime soon.

Things are different with aircraft. For many years, with assistance of ILS (Instrument Landing Systems) and other technologies, human pilots have been able to fly in complete fog or darkness, just relying on their instruments. A human pilot in an aircraft is much easier to be replaced by a computer, compared to a human driver in a car. Aircraft never have obstacles in front of them. Aircraft do not merge into highways. They fly over very controlled routes in very controlled environments. A dream setup for machines replacing humans. Actually, this has already happened in military and space exploration. Air cargo is next.