Tall trucks can be handy early bird indicators of traffic snafus, for which AI self-driving cars … [+]
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Let’s go on a safari!
As you head out onto the savanna, you keenly observe that the area is rife with wildlife. Whoa, right over there is a zebra. Say, look, some warthogs are meandering near those trees. Majestic gazelles are grazing nearby. You even spy an ostrich or two. A truly marvelous safari experience.
Amongst a clump of trees, you notice a giraffe that is pulling at and chewing on leaves and twigs, high up on a tall tree. That’s how giraffes tend to eat. With their long necks and long legs, they usually dine on the upper parts of trees. Few other animals are able to reach those topmost locales and thus there is almost always a guaranteed meal by naturally being in that heightened position.
Wait for a second, the giraffe is furtively looking around.
What’s is happening?
Off in the distance, a lion is being sneaky and gradually approaching this spot where a slew of animals are innocently enjoying their day. The animals that are low to the ground have no inkling that the lion is making its way in this direction. Those animals cannot see far enough away due to being so close to the ground. Meanwhile, relying on merely the odor of a lion to detect its presence is a dicey proposition since the lion is cleverly upwind and won’t be sniffed until the last moment.
By the last moment, this means that the lion will already be within striking distance and these regal animals will be in dire straits, unlikely able to escape a fierce attack.
The giraffe though can plainly see what the lion is trying to do. Even though giraffes oftentimes fight off a lion, the effort expends a tremendous amount of energy and the outcome is not always going to be in the favor of the giraffe. Giraffes usually prefer the option of fleeing in a choice between the proverbial and existential fight-or-flight conundrum, all else being equal.
So, the giraffe makes a bit of noise and starts quickly to move to another further away spot.
The animals nearby had been watching the giraffe intently, noticing observantly that the giraffe was clearly on edge about something. When the giraffe subsequently decided to abruptly take leave of this particular locale, the other animals quickly scattered too. They didn’t necessarily know why the giraffe got spooked, but the very fact that the giraffe was alarmed provided sufficient indication that they too needed to be apprehensive.
You could assert that those animals were wise to use the giraffe as an early warning signal. By doing so, the animals were able to leverage the survival advantages of a giraffe to their own benefit, namely, its tall stature. While those animals were grazing or lolling around, they had an eye on the giraffe. If the giraffe showed signs of unease, those attentive animals would get an early heads-up to be on their toes.
After the giraffe opted to skedaddle, the now alerted animals figured they ought to do so too.
Furthermore, the direction that the giraffe is headed is yet another helpful clue.
Presumably, the giraffe would seek to proceed in a direction that would have the least amount of impending danger. You see, perhaps lions are coming from multiple directions, and as such, the other animals would be going directly into a deathly trap if they perchance tried to escape in the wrong direction.
The giraffe provides a potential signpost of where safety might be.
For those of you that have been on a safari, you’ve assuredly seen this type of behavior. For those of you that are aiming to go on safari now that the world is opening up again, please keep your eyes peeled for these kinds of animalistic machinations. Nature is wonderful to observe in action.
The good news is that you can observe the same behavior right here, during your daily commute. You don’t need to fly to a faraway savanna.
How so?
Simply stated, savvy drivers, keep their eye on tall trucks when in the throes of navigating those thorny traffic snarls and roadway trips across town. Tall trucks are akin to the giraffes of a safari journey, except they just so happen to be on our existent freeways, highways, and local byways.
Here’s the deal.
You are in traffic on the freeway and the traffic is, fortunately, moving relatively steadily. This has been going on for a while and you have gotten accustomed to the free-flowing effect. Your thoughts drift to that baseball game that you have tickets to attend later that night. Perhaps you are also daydreaming about a vacation planned to the African savanna (well, la-di-dah, that’s quite a coincidence since that’s what I’ve just been discussing herein!).
While your mind drifts, unbeknownst to you a ladder has fallen onto the freeway, occurring about a half-mile up ahead. There is no immediate way that you would know this has happened.
Vehicles that are directly behind the fallen ladder are beginning to jockey wildly. Some drivers are choosing to straddle the ladder. Other drivers are ramming the ladder and forcing it to skirt around in the lanes of traffic. This is a really bad situation. The odds are that someone is going to veer and smash into other vehicles, doing so to avoid the now fractured ladder that is menacing the traffic.
As you know, there is a kind of cascading course of events that usually takes place in these circumstances. The vehicles closest to the obstructing ladder will do a dance of avoidance. Other vehicles just behind those dancing vehicles will begin to shortly also get engaged in the dance. A rippling effect will have other vehicles further behind that start to do a dance, either using their brakes, changing lanes, or at times making crazy maneuvers.
The ripple can take many precious moments to arrive at your further back position. By the time that the cascading reaches you, it could be that you’ll need to radically jam on the brakes. Had you been able to somehow spy beforehand that the traffic was reacting in this untoward manner, you could have been prepared for what was going to occur.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a giraffe was grazing up ahead and could showcase that danger lurked on the roadway?
No need for a giraffe to be on our roadways when we have tall trucks.
The chances are reasonably good that a truck driver might see the transpiring and evolving events in an early bird manner. Being seated up high in a tall truck does have its intrinsic advantages. You can frequently see further ahead and therefore anticipate what is going to happen on the roadway.
Sure enough, a trucker is moving over into the slow lane and the brake lights suggest the truck is decreasing speed. Several trucks are doing this. All at once. Unless you are truly asleep at the wheel (I hope not), you are bound to see that the trucks are in unison taking evasive action.
You might not have any clue that a ladder is causing troubles up ahead. All that you know is that those trucks sure seem concerned. And if the trucks are concerned, you ought to be too. You are thankfully prodded out of your daydream stupor and now are on full alert. At the same time, you decide to get into the slow lane.
A smart move. The ladder continues to foul traffic in the faster lanes. Those vehicles stuck in the faster lanes are all having a devil of a time. You’re having gotten into the slow lane was timely and saved you from the trauma of coping directly with the fallen ladder.
Who do you owe gratitude to?
Tall trucks and truck drivers are paying attention to the roads.
I suppose you can thank giraffes too, though that’s not pertinent per se to having averted disaster with that ladder. Giraffes are worth thanking, just for the sake of things.
Not all car drivers opt to use tall trucks as an early warning.
Some car drivers are oblivious to the very notion that tall trucks can serve as an early bird. This has never occurred to those car drivers as a type of driving technique. They blissfully drive along and take no notice of trucks, other than when they perchance find themselves immediately behind a giant truck. In that case, their view is entirely obscured and they are hopping mad about it.
Other drivers do take notice of tall trucks.
Within that camp, there are the car drivers that always watch for tall trucks. They watch them intently. It is both a fun game to play and derives that early warning opportunity. Then there are the car drivers that sometimes notice tall trucks. This is pretty much one of those veritable “out of sight, out of mind” considerations until a tall truck suddenly does something unusual.
If a tall truck starts to do something out of the usual pattern, such as trying quickly to change lanes, rather than doing so slowly and gradually, this becomes a noticeable behavior change. Of course, you don’t know that this portends for anything untoward up ahead. There could be lots of reasons for the tall truck to make such moves.
Your mind is usually exploring patterns in the behavior of traffic.
All the tall trucks are consistently aligned and moving along at a steady pace. That’s one pattern. They each turn on their blinkers and appear to be each scrambling to make a lane change. Aha, this is a pattern that suggests something is amiss. They might know something that you don’t yet know.
In short, you cannot blankly assume that the behavior of tall trucks is going to for sure be an indicator of what might lay ahead. On the other hand, you would be remiss in not giving this early indicator its proper due. Like the animals that are low to the ground on the savanna rightly know, you ignore the giraffe at your own peril.
Speaking of cars, the future of cars consists of AI-based true self-driving cars.
Allow me a moment to elaborate.
There isn’t a human driver involved in a true self-driving car. Keep in mind that true self-driving cars are driven via an AI driving system. There isn’t a need for a human driver at the wheel, and nor is there a provision for a human to drive the vehicle. For my extensive and ongoing coverage of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and especially self-driving cars, see the link here.
Here’s an intriguing question that is worth pondering: Will AI-based true self-driving cars leverage the early bird indications of tall trucks, and if so what might this portend?
Before jumping into the details, I’d like to further clarify what is meant when I refer to true self-driving cars.
Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless vehicles are considered Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).
For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars And Tall Trucks As Tipsters
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.
All occupants will be passengers.
The AI is doing the driving.
One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient. In other words, the AI is altogether a collective of computer-based programming and algorithms, and most assuredly not able to reason in the same manner that humans can.
Why this added emphasis about the AI not being sentient?
Because I want to underscore that when discussing the role of the AI driving system, I am not ascribing human qualities to the AI. Please be aware that there is an ongoing and dangerous tendency these days to anthropomorphize AI. In essence, people are assigning human-like sentience to today’s AI, despite the undeniable and inarguable fact that no such AI exists as yet.
With that clarification, you can envision that the AI driving system won’t natively somehow “know” about the facets of driving. Driving and all that it entails will need to be programmed as part of the hardware and software of the self-driving car.
Let’s dive into the myriad of aspects that come to play on this topic.
The initial reaction that many non-insiders have about this matter of today’s self-driving cars giving due attention to the movement of tall trucks is usually quite consistent and pronounced. There is one line that I often hear over and over.
Here it is.
Don’t self-driving cars already do this?
The answer is generally nope, few of the self-driving car efforts underway are giving much attention to observing the far ahead movement of tall trucks. Not at least with respect to serving as an early bird indicator.
To clarify, by and large, any well-devised self-driving cars and their accompanying AI driving system are ostensibly detecting any tall trucks that are immediately nearby such as in front of or adjacent to the self-driving car.
That’s kind of a given.
This though is pretty much a classic monkey-see-monkey-do type of detection.
Via the sensors on the self-driving car, the AI driving system is computationally analyzing the nearby driving scene. The sensor suite can contain a variety of sensing devices, including video cameras, radar, LIDAR, ultrasonic units, thermal imagining, and so on. The devices are collecting raw data about the surroundings. By using various image processing and other sensory analysis techniques, including Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), the objects and their positions are being internally noted and plotted.
The mainstay of this computational analysis is aimed at closer objects. A tall truck that is in the adjacent lane and paralleling the self-driving car is given top priority for detection. This makes indubitable sense since that truck could suddenly swerve into the lane of the self-driving car. Similarly, a tall truck that is directly in front of the self-driving car deserves some rapt computational focus.
Scanning the horizon up ahead and examining the driving scene for tall trucks that are quite further ahead in traffic is something that few AI driving systems are yet programmed to do. That’s considered an advanced feature or piece of functionality. Indeed, it is something that many would claim is an edge or corner case, meaning that it is low in priority, does not merit being rated or ranked as in the core realm of driving, and can be dealt with someday in the future.
An AI driving system can be bereft of this capability and still drive a car, they would contend.
You could say the same about human drivers.
On the other hand, any added means to try and improve safety while driving is certainly worthy of getting some serious attention. We might be willing to accept the idea that not all humans are going to be considering the tall truck early bird indications, but we are bound to be less lenient regarding AI driving systems that are not exploiting this advantage.
You might expect that lawsuits will later on land on this same type of consideration (for my discussion on various likely lawsuits that will end up engulfing the self-driving car arena, see the link here).
In other words, a self-driving car gets caught up in a traffic accident on the freeway. Assume that the AI driving system itself is not at direct fault. Meanwhile, assume that there were passengers inside the self-driving car and they got injured. In essence, the self-driving car got carried into a cascading series of human-driven car crashes for which the human passengers that were within the self-driving car were harmed accordingly.
This is a very realistic scenario.
Suppose that the AI driving system lacked any semblance of using tall trucks as an early predictor of traffic. And, let’s envision that a post-crash expert-performed forensic analysis demonstrates that had the AI driving system been scanning for the behaviors of tall trucks, the odds are that the self-driving car could have averted getting carried into the melee.
Could the automaker and self-driving tech firm be sued on the basis that they failed to provide a necessary and crucial element for their AI driving system?
We’ll see how that plays out.
Insiders right now would exhort that the tall truck early bird detection is no more than a flighty distractor from the real issues that need to be addressed for making the AI driving system readied to drive on our public roadways. To them, the idea is certainly an intriguing notion and one that perhaps deserves attention someday, it is just not worthy at this time. Getting self-driving cars to drive safely from point A to point B is the urgent call to order. Messing around with detecting tall trucks that are out of immediate reach and seemingly beyond the “danger zone” is a lofty ideal and more theory than something required in practical terms.
You can say that if you wish, but if it made the difference between harm or even life-or-death for passengers inside a self-driving car, those will be words of hollow value to loved ones and the harmed riders.
Insiders would likely take another stance on this matter too.
They would assert that V2V will otherwise solve this open-ended concern.
V2V refers to vehicle-to-vehicle electronic communications.
Self-driving cars are expected to be outfitted with V2V so that AI driving systems can readily communicate with each other. A self-driving car that is up ahead in traffic could presumably send an electronic signal that there is a ladder in the roadway. All other self-driving cars coming up upon the situation will receive the V2V message. Hopefully, the AI driving systems of those self-driving cars will then use that as a heads-up.
Problem solved.
No need to visually try to figure out what is going on with those tall trucks. Just rely upon V2V and you’ll be fine.
Well, that’s not quite the case.
First, suppose there aren’t any V2V equipped vehicles up ahead. That’s a high likelihood right now and certainly for the foreseeable future. It is going to take years upon years, probably decades before V2V gets widely adopted.
During that long period of time, you are merely hanging your hat on something that might eventually become widespread. You are rolling the dice for those passengers inside the self-driving car. If they are lucky, perchance a self-driving car or self-driving truck up ahead has V2V. I’m not sure that luck ought to be a vital component of safe driving.
Let’s pretend that by your lucky stars that indeed there is a V2V equipped vehicle up ahead.
Think about what has to take place to effectively utilize that capability.
A V2V equipped vehicle first confronting the ladder has to detect whatever problem is underway. That’s obviously the cornerstone needed step. Whether it does this or not, there is a high chance it will do so, but still, some chance that it might not.
The AI driving system presumably should be primarily focusing on the safety efforts immediately needed for that self-driving car, and secondarily be considering the need to send out V2V messages about the debris or roadway obstruction. This seems prudent and logical.
Once the V2V is transmitted, other self-driving cars have to be within range to pick up the V2V. It could be that the transmission is not able to be received. Include this consideration in your odds making.
Assuming that a further back self-driving car does receive the V2V, and does so on a timely basis, the receiving AI driving system has to computationally take into account this added piece of driving-related data.
But how much weight should the V2V message be given?
In some theoretical nirvana, the V2V message is completely apt, timely, and utterly trustworthy. The AI driving system can heed whatever the V2V message has provided. No questions asked. Take cover or otherwise evasive actions simply based on the V2V indication.
This seems like a doubtful proposition, or downright scary.
I believe most passengers would hope that the AI driving system does at least a “trust, but verify” of whatever the V2V has indicated. I know that I would want that to happen.
And, this leads us to the following somewhat ironic point, the AI driving system should probably be then analyzing the traffic up ahead to see that it comports with whatever the V2V has alerted. This has a semblance of irony because the very thing that we are saying the AI driving system ought to be doing anyway, namely looking ahead at those tall trucks, now becomes a vital element of the AI driving system, to begin with.
Conclusion
Before anyone has a bellyache or conniption, let’s also agree that just because the early bird detection of tall trucks might be included in the AI driving system, this does not make self-driving cars somehow impervious to traffic problems.
Heck no.
Just as stated earlier when considering how human drivers make use of the tall truck scenario, there are plenty of ways that the tall truck movement can be interpreted. It is easy to get a false impression based on the behaviors of those tall trucks. They do not provide certainty. They only provide an added basis for judiciously making driving decisions.
One final set of thoughts.
A smarmy person might point out that via the use of drones, none of this tall truck stuff is needed. To some extent, this is a valid point and I have discussed at length the coming use of drones as paired with the advent of self-driving cars (see my discussion at this link here). As a polite retort to the drones prognosticator, we do not know when drones will be actively adopted for these purposes. In addition, we don’t know whether drones will be available in all places and at all times (such as being grounded during foul weather conditions).
In short, those tall trucks can still matter.
Notice that I’ve not said anything about whether those tall trucks are driven by a human truck driver or by an AI driving system. All told, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference in terms of utilizing the tall trucks in their giraffe capacity.
A giraffe is a giraffe, and we can be darned happy that they stand tall.
Go, giraffes, go.