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by mturmon 3362 days ago
No objection. But portions of commercial routes can be arranged to get around many of these edge cases.

I was trying to address the question raised by the comment above: is this a problem of principles or of engineering, by saying that for a big (proportion TBD) segment of routes, it's engineering. Put onboard a bunch of sensors and computer power.

1 comments

Yes, but that is a hack of sorts, and if the volumes are low a very expensive one so likely this will not happen until there is a sizable fleet of vehicles that can take advantage of it. You'd expect those things to happen in lock-step.

The apples-to-apples comparison of automated driving to normal driving is that we have an existing road system and we want to use that for automated driving and normal driving and automated driving should meet or exceed normal driving if it is to be successful.

The ultimate adapted commercial route for transport is called a railway, any kind of re-arrangement of the road system in order to adapt it for better use for automated driving is going to be a 'first world only' affair, and probably only a very small subset of that first world.

So for the foreseeable future automated driving systems will have to cope with all of the eventualities, even if for some stretch of their workload they may find things a little easier because of special adaptations (which of course will have to be equally accommodating to human drivers, or at a minimum not hinder them).

>'first world only' affair, and probably only a very small subset of that first world.

As in, heavily trafficked inner city routes like buses. I think it will make a lot of impact fast.