Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?
Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
Conor:
Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
And the big red button for when the SHTF.
Nothing like the level 5 autonomy of a meatbot. Same in planes, pilots are there to simply monitor systems but have the added bonus of being actually able to fly the plane when the system cannot.
They are very popular in New Zealand
Dr Damon:
the maoster:
Why? Same reason planes have pilots. They might be willing to let a robot kill one or two people but draw a line at them killing 300.Come on maoster I am sure you know planes more or less fly themselves these days. There have also been many flights without pilots although not with passengers. Yet.
I totally agree with you that aircraft are more than capable of flying themselves, but that just kind of reinforces my point as to why they’re still manned; quite simply the passengers will not accept it. It works on relatively slow speed simple applications such as the DLR which has been autonomous since day 1, which as I say is widely accepted.
Passenger trains per se and passenger aircraft have a driver/pilot simply for that one in a million times that they need to intercede.
We all know that unmanned drones fill our skies but that in itself begs the question as to why in a multi million pound fighter aircraft such as a Typhoon for example do they waste space by putting a comfy chair in it?
It was widely acknowledged during the development of Typhoon and JSF that they would be the last generation of manned weapons platforms as the weakest link in the system was the man driving it not being able to withstand high G manouvers.
Drones seem to be the platform of choice these days but still require a whole host of techy types to make it “go” and certainly not doing it autonomously.
Still havent “won” the war against bunch of 7th century rag heads in the desert have they?
onesock:
They are very popular in New Zealand
Sheep? Back yard cricket? BBQ’s? Pie an a V from the servo?
All of these things are popular in Aotearoa.
I’m going to come straight out with it. This is your second trolling account.
well done. now you know that I don’t like you. ahhhhh.
After all it IS Trucknet “UK”
onesock:
well done. now you know that I don’t like you. ahhhhh.
Imagine me giving a flying ■■■■.
Because thats as close as you will ever get to it actually happening.
Conor:
Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
The underground is a little bit more controlled in terms of environment, but trains have drivers because there are perceived to be cases where the train will need to be stopped in circumstances where a computer would not detect the problem (or would falsely detect and slam on the brakes too often). There is also then a responsible person on board when things do go wrong - for example, to stop people wandering onto lines when the train has stopped.
Planes cannot even be stopped, and for that reason a pilot is there to ensure the plane stays in the air when parameters exceed those which have been modelled for the computer, and give a hundred people a fighting chance of being able to land.
Human pilots can respond to, for example, a piece of wing being lost - quickly theorising how it will affect the controls and adjusting their input roughly.
A computer cannot do that, because it cannot necessarily perceive the nature of the fault, because it doesn’t have eyes. And even if it did, it is likely that not all exceptional failures will have been modelled and programmed by aviation computer experts on the ground, so there still has to be someone on board who is capable of understanding the problem and responding literally on the fly.
Rjan:
Conor:
Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
The underground is a little bit more controlled in terms of environment, but trains have drivers because there are perceived to be cases where the train will need to be stopped in circumstances where a computer would not detect the problem (or would falsely detect and slam on the brakes too often). There is also then a responsible person on board when things do go wrong - for example, to stop people wandering onto lines when the train has stopped.
Planes cannot even be stopped, and for that reason a pilot is there to ensure the plane stays in the air when parameters exceed those which have been modelled for the computer, and give a hundred people a fighting chance of being able to land.
Human pilots can respond to, for example, a piece of wing being lost - quickly theorising how it will affect the controls and adjusting their input roughly.
A computer cannot do that, because it cannot necessarily perceive the nature of the fault, because it doesn’t have eyes. And even if it did, it is likely that not all exceptional failures will have been modelled and programmed by aviation computer experts on the ground, so there still has to be someone on board who is capable of understanding the problem and responding literally on the fly.
I think you are a little behind the times fella.Forget the underground. There are trains that travel without drivers. There are planes that can fly without pilots and both can deal with faults better than humans.
Do some research and you will learn.
It seems the idea of quoting a post is beyond the human mind. Maybe that needs autonomy.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Dr Damon:
Rjan:
Conor:
Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
The underground is a little bit more controlled in terms of environment, but trains have drivers because there are perceived to be cases where the train will need to be stopped in circumstances where a computer would not detect the problem (or would falsely detect and slam on the brakes too often). There is also then a responsible person on board when things do go wrong - for example, to stop people wandering onto lines when the train has stopped.
Planes cannot even be stopped, and for that reason a pilot is there to ensure the plane stays in the air when parameters exceed those which have been modelled for the computer, and give a hundred people a fighting chance of being able to land.
Human pilots can respond to, for example, a piece of wing being lost - quickly theorising how it will affect the controls and adjusting their input roughly.
A computer cannot do that, because it cannot necessarily perceive the nature of the fault, because it doesn’t have eyes. And even if it did, it is likely that not all exceptional failures will have been modelled and programmed by aviation computer experts on the ground, so there still has to be someone on board who is capable of understanding the problem and responding literally on the fly.
I think you are a little behind the times fella.Forget the underground. There are trains that travel without drivers. There are planes that can fly without pilots and both can deal with faults better than humans.
Do some research and you will learn.
US Airways Flight 1549.
155 real people.
I would like to see a computer come up with that solution.
I personally would not like the idea of stepping onto a plane without a pilot or getting into the back of a taxi without a driver even though the technology could and does allow that. However with autonomous vehicles, they are carrying goods and not people, in this respect I would feel comfortable sharing the roads with them rather than sat in one. Totally different concept, if something went wrong with the autonomous truck, I could do something about it by avoiding it with my car. Also there would be a driver on board rather like the pilot at the ready to take control in such an event.
The cynicism is weak here!
Pilots and train drivers are present to ensure that Boeing / Siemens etc don’t take the blame for a crash. Nothing at all to do with maybe being able to take over and save the day.
Rjan:
Planes cannot even be stopped, and for that reason a pilot is there to ensure the plane stays in the air when parameters exceed those which have been modelled for the computer, and give a hundred people a fighting chance of being able to land.Human pilots can respond to, for example, a piece of wing being lost - quickly theorising how it will affect the controls and adjusting their input roughly.
A computer cannot do that, because it cannot necessarily perceive the nature of the fault, because it doesn’t have eyes. And even if it did, it is likely that not all exceptional failures will have been modelled and programmed by aviation computer experts on the ground, so there still has to be someone on board who is capable of understanding the problem and responding literally on the fly.
Computers can fly aircraft in states that no human pilot could fly them, hence modern fighters are designed to be so unstable that no human could control it, the pilot just pushes the controls to steer it, the computers keeps it flying. There have also been many air crash incidents especially in airliners where the pilots didn’t know what systems were and weren’t damaged they actually haven’t got that good a visibility of all the aircraft. They’ve also had to experiment to see what would and wouldn’t work, computers are as likely to be able to analyse this far faster. They’ve even been developing systems that can control a plane using only engine thrust, in the case of a total hydraulic system failure as happened to United 232 at Sioux City and there have been other instances where pilots have only had engines to control their aircraft.
Dr Damon:
I think you are a little behind the times fella.Forget the underground. There are trains that travel without drivers. There are planes that can fly without pilots and both can deal with faults better than humans.
Do some research and you will learn.
When you say Planes that fly without pilots, do you mean drones which actually have pilot, just not in the aircraft or truly autonomous flight?
The biggest problem with autonomous passenger planes might not be the technology, but passenger acceptance, the surveys show that many are very willing to use them at the moment, also most land based autonomous vehicles have a function to come safely to a halt if it comes into a situation is can’t cope with, this isn’t really an option with an aircraft.
Finally autonomous passenger aircraft, almost more so than any other vehicle would have to be 100% safe, Are people as willing to accept an autonomous system failings leading to loss of life as much as they are willing to accept human failings.
As for Driverless trains, yes there are many driverless train systems, but the ones I know of seem to be on metro systems and I’ve been on several driverless trains in various Airports, but these seems to have a cable pulling the carriage, so although no doubt computer controlled at some point, are they really autonomous units able to make decisions based on information gathered? I should imagine all they have is an emergency stop system where somebody then investigates the problem. I believe DLR is also controlled by a central computer and control room.
I’ve never read of any truly autonomous trains on long distance, high speed mainlines, although there is research into this and SNCF wants to run Automated TGV’s, but I’m willing to be corrected, these trains will have to be genuinely autonomous, they’ll need the sensors and cameras to feed information about the surrounding environment to the trains computer it will also have take the decision what action to take, no doubt possible, but isn’t in use yet.
What will happen when two vehicles meet on a tight country lane. Someone said it yesterday on the radio. Do they reverse all the way back to the main road or both move over?
Dr Damon:
Rjan:
Conor:
Wheel Nut:
If these autonomous trucks are so simple and safe, why have trains got a driver?Because the public want one, not because they’re needed. On the underground they don’t even apply the brakes and the throttle, literally the only thing they do is press a button to open the doors.
The underground is a little bit more controlled in terms of environment, but trains have drivers because there are perceived to be cases where the train will need to be stopped in circumstances where a computer would not detect the problem (or would falsely detect and slam on the brakes too often). There is also then a responsible person on board when things do go wrong - for example, to stop people wandering onto lines when the train has stopped.
Planes cannot even be stopped, and for that reason a pilot is there to ensure the plane stays in the air when parameters exceed those which have been modelled for the computer, and give a hundred people a fighting chance of being able to land.
Human pilots can respond to, for example, a piece of wing being lost - quickly theorising how it will affect the controls and adjusting their input roughly.
A computer cannot do that, because it cannot necessarily perceive the nature of the fault, because it doesn’t have eyes. And even if it did, it is likely that not all exceptional failures will have been modelled and programmed by aviation computer experts on the ground, so there still has to be someone on board who is capable of understanding the problem and responding literally on the fly.
I think you are a little behind the times fella.Forget the underground. There are trains that travel without drivers. There are planes that can fly without pilots and both can deal with faults better than humans.
Do some research and you will learn.
I think you’ll find trains without drivers are still the minority of trains on specially built routes (i.e. the environment is more controlled than the majority of rail ways) and no passenger planes fly without pilots.
The computers usually make fewer mistakes than a human under normal circumstances, that is true. But I think you’re missing my point that the computer cannot generally respond to a full complement of exceptional circumstances.
The driverless train, depending on its technology, will either slam on because a balloon drifts in front of the track, or it will plough off the rails in a section of broken track. Most level crossings in this country still have dedicated signallers, because computers cannot properly conceive what is going on around the track in ways that humans find trivial.
The whole thing can be automated of course, but I don’t think you realise how much expense is actually involved in controlling the environment sufficiently to allow a computer to operate reliably.
And with planes, as I say, things break mid-flight in unexpected ways, and that is when a human has to rethink the situation in ways that might not already have been modelled on the ground and programmed into the computer - not only to maintain flight, but to land.
Dr Damon:
the maoster:
Why? Same reason planes have pilots. They might be willing to let a robot kill one or two people but draw a line at them killing 300.Come on maoster I am sure you know planes more or less fly themselves these days. There have also been many flights without pilots although not with passengers. Yet.
There’s a nice article here that tries to explain the gulf between perception and reality.
askthepilot.com/questionansw … ion-myths/
An autopilot can “fly” the aircraft on a pre programmed path. However, the aircraft most definitely cannot fly itself, deal with itself or manage its own flight. The auto pilot is actually pretty stupid. It knows so much but cannot deal with unknowns outside of pre determined logarithms. And it only ever follows a path through the flight guidance computers that a human has commanded.
The notion of aircraft flying themselves is actually a sound bite the press have grasped hold of. The aviation community know it’s too laborious to explain how wildly off the mark this is so they let it slide and let people think it. It’s like saying to the crew of apollo 13 “you didn’t fly that mission mate, it’s got a flight guidance computer” 
Flying straight and level is relatively easy. Every Pilot first learns how to do this in toy sized light aircraft way back in initial training. Granted, airliners are vastly harder to hand fly than a Cessna however flying straight and level is pretty much at the bottom of the demand pool placed on a Pilots workload compared to other elements of hand flying, such as the landing. So it’s a waste to have a pilot sitting holding the yoke for ten hours when the vast array of other demands and tasks warrant full attention.
Automation has only assisted the releatively easy part of piloting. But the public believe hand flying is the hard part. I think this comes from the days of private flying on basic aircraft or the old piston aircraft like DC3s where all pilots had to worry about was pretty much where they were going and driving the thing and that was it and that was how people defined the difficulty of flying. Hand flying aircraft not only became harder with jet technology but also the advance of speed and the environment in which they operate. There’s a bit more going on in jet aircraft. But even still Pilots still routinely hand fly the most challenging phases in jet airliners. It’s more like this. Surgeons use computers to aid their surgery. They don’t still use just basic tools. Now they carry out far more complex procedures, aided by technology, but their manual skill set is as advanced if not more than before.
Take a flight from JFK -LHR in the winter off a snow contaminated runway. For starters there is quite a lot of calculating and descision making regarding performance and ha doing of the aircraft in such a hostile environment. There’s also a stack ton of regulations, procedures, decision making tools, and years of knowledge you need to apply to keep a flight safe and legal in a wildly variable environment that doesn’t lend itself well to singular digital decision making. And a lot of this comes down to judgement and experience. It still says at the back of our Boeing quick reaction handbook that the crew’s judgement, knowledge of systems and airmanship is vital in correct decision making.
To kind of see what Boeing are getting at take a look at the DC10 that went in at Sioux City. A call to McDonald Douglas who manufactured the aircraft yieldied pretty much a “mm, dunno on this one”:-
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_ … Flight_232
People often refer to aircraft landing themselves, so take an autoland. It’s actually one of the more intensive procedures we do. Contrary to opinion 99.9 percent of the time take off and landings are hand flown. In bad viz an autoland is used. But here’s the deal. The monitoring of it is intense due to a cascading amount of variables or failures that can happen very close to the ground and with some of these failures you cannot allow the aircraft to try and land. You have to be able to diagnose extremely quickly and mitigate using correct action. You actually have to be pretty wired up and on it to manage an autoland. Autoland cannot deal with anything other than a slight crosswind. It also is completely out of its depth with strong gusting winds nevermind windshear.
This is with things as they are at the moment. I don’t doubt in some future there will be a massive change in technology and propulsion, infrastructure, even the nature of how aircraft are launched such that unmanned airliners will be seen. But it will be a long time yet.
^^^^^ just wot I sed 
, a tad longer and far more concise to be sure, but it still boils down to the same thing. 