While there are more and more industry giants investing in the the research and development of autonomous driving, it seems to be difficult to fully commercialize it.
There are several reasons why autonomous driving is difficult to achieve commercialization:
1. Human safety
The first and foremost thing we need to address is to guarantee the safety of drivers, passengers and other people involved. Automatic driving systems must take into account safety issues. At present, self driving needs not only the complicated algorithm, but also the support of hardware such as camera, lidar and millimeter wave radar.
2. Complicated scenarios
The conditions on roads are complex, troubled with the bad weather such as wind, rain, hail, frost and snow, and dynamic environmental factors such as pedestrians and animals coming into the scene.
3. Intricate algorithm
There are many types of algorithms to be realized in automatic driving, and various factors need to be considered. We should not only deal with the coordination between software and hardware systems, but also take laws, regulations, ethics and other issues into consideration.
4. Incomplete the laws and regulations
The laws and regulations on automatic driving are not complete enough to address all the conditions that we may encounter, which leads to the failure to effectively upgrade the automatic driving system. In the automatic driving algorithm, some emergency situations should be properly responded to according to laws and regulations, without which it is obvious that the automatic driving system cannot be perfectly designed.
5. Accident liability
Traffic accidents may occur on roads. Now, it is difficult to set a standard for liability distribution for traffic accidents, and there are no clear laws and regulations on the division of responsibility for car accidents.
The purpose of autonomous driving technology is to make travel more convenient. If it is separated from safety, convenience will lose its meaning.
With all the issues discussed above, safety is of paramount importance for us to consider. So let’s dig into it and see what we can find.
In the future, if we can actually drive automatically, whether we can be free to let go of the steering wheel or not should be based on specific regions, road conditions and ages. For example, in urban sections and high-speed sections, attention should be especially paid.
- In urban sections, conditions are much more complicated than those in high-speed sections.
- All intelligence can be used only when there is a smooth signal of the network. With poor signals and bad road conditions, human control is safer and more secure;
- People of different ages, such as young people and the elderly, have different needs, and their ability to accept smart devices and the speed of reaction are different. So situations should vary from person to person.
Autonomous driving is an area of huge potential, though it has to deal with so many issues and problems we have discussed above. Much needs to be done to develop a completely safe system for self driving.
