China: Drone Cargo Tested

[Shady McSly]

For other types of motorized vehicles, see Motor vehicle. For the 2006 Pixar film, see Cars (film). For other uses, see Car (disambiguation) and Automobile (disambiguation).
A car (or automobile) is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transportation. Most definitions of car say they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four tires, and mainly transport people rather than goods.[2][3] Cars came into global use during the 20th century, and developed economies depend on them. The year 1886 is regarded as the birth year of the modern car, when German inventor Karl Benz built his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Cars did not become widely available until the early 20th century. One of the first cars that was accessible to the masses was the 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. Cars were rapidly adopted in the US, where they replaced animal-drawn carriages and carts, but took much longer to be accepted in Western Europe and other parts of the world.

Car
401 Gridlock.jpg
Modern cars and trucks driving on an expressway in Ontario.
Classification Vehicle
Industry Various
Application Transportation
Fuel source Gasoline, Diesel, Natural gas, Electric, Hydrogen, Solar, Vegetable Oil
Powered Yes
Self-propelled Yes
Wheels 3–4
Axles 1–2
Inventor Karl Benz[1]
Cars have controls for driving, parking, passenger comfort and safety, and controlling a variety of lights. Over the decades, additional features and controls have been added to vehicles, making them progressively more complex. Examples include rear reversing cameras, air conditioning, navigation systems, and in car entertainment. Most cars in use in the 2010s are propelled by an internal combustion engine, fueled by the combustion of fossil fuels. This causes air pollution and is also blamed for contributing to climate change and global warming.[4] Vehicles using alternative fuels such as ethanol flexible-fuel vehicles and natural gas vehicles are also gaining popularity in some countries. Electric cars, which were invented early in the history of the car, began to become commercially available in 2008.

There are costs and benefits to car use. The costs include acquiring the vehicle, interest payments (if the car is financed), repairs and maintenance, fuel, depreciation, driving time, parking fees, taxes, and insurance.[5] The costs to society include maintaining roads, land use, road congestion, air pollution, public health, health care, and disposing of the vehicle at the end of its life. Road traffic accidents are the largest cause of injury-related deaths worldwide.[6]

The benefits include on-demand transportation, mobility, independence, and convenience.[7] The societal benefits include economic benefits, such as job and wealth creation from the automotive industry, transportation provision, societal well-being from leisure and travel opportunities, and revenue generation from the taxes. The ability for people to move flexibly from place to place has far-reaching implications for the nature of societies.[8] It was estimated in 2014 that the number of cars was over 1.25 billion vehicles,[9] up from the 500 million of 1986.[10] The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China, India and other newly industrialized countries.[11]

[confusedalot]

If I had my way, I would live in London or Paris, and would not have a car. Public transportation is superb.

There is absolutely no way that I can live without a car in little old Montreal as a poor suburbanite. Public transport is available, but it sucks big time. It takes three times longer to get anywhere versus a car, if you are lucky enough to even get the service near where you want to go.

North America was built on the car culture, so it is going to be a long time before that gets undone, if ever.

[Diadem]

Meatservo, your references to the dogs driving is irrelevant, and you know it; they were on a controlled track, not public streets, and they didn't drive 3.5 million miles.
I can count on two hands, at most, the number of accidents I know of where human ingenuity has saved lives and automation would have been useless. In contrast, I've personally read hundreds of accident reports from top to bottom, no hyperbole, and I'm familiar with a far larger number of accidents; there are thousands of cases where humans have misinterpreted their instruments, ignored their instruments, or incorrectly set their instruments and flown perfectly functional airplanes into the ground. How many times have planes run out of fuel while the crew was distracted? How many aircraft have been flown into mountains on approaches and missed approaches because the crew failed to comprehend their plates? Humans are by far the largest cause of crashes, with at least half being attributable to pilot error. Maybe once in a while having a human on board allows for some creative problem-solving, but much, much more often those humans make mistakes; sometimes, humans turn minor issues into major crashes. Our job is routine and boring 99.99% of the time, with SOPs and the current level of automation already taking most of the decision-making and interpretation away from pilots; it's such an anomaly for humans to be dealing with an unforeseen situation that it doesn't make sense to put lives at risk from pilot error on the off-chance that something ridiculous arises. Computers might not be creative like humans, but they do what they're programmed to do, and they don't lose situational awareness or ignore dropping fuel gauges.

[Meatservo]

Yeah, but no dog has ever crashed an aeroplane, either. That's a safety record unparalleled by either humans or computers.

The same level of sophistry that makes someone count the number of times human ingenuity has made a difference IN an accident, while deliberately ignoring the number of times it has prevented one... because you can't. No-one ever records the time something terrible would have happened if they hadn't done something. Like the number of times I prevented an accident by NOT letting my dog drive, for instance.

He only gets to drive under close supervision. Like the Google car.

[YYZSaabGuy]

“We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

The Coming Software Apocalypse
I do warn that the linked article will definitely exceed the attention span of the average AvCanada reader by a large margin...

That was a very thought-provoking article: thanks for posting.

[GyvAir]

Snow.

I have little doubt that “teaching” the self-driving cars (and self-flying aircraft) to deal with northern winter driving conditions is going to be quite challenging. It’s not hard to imagine a Google car becoming totally befuddled by a drift or windrow of snow across the mouth of its destination street that any experience winter driver would just size up and then either plow on through, or drive on past while considering other options. Random depths and widths of slush ruts along the route pulling at the wheels and blowing snow flooding the sensors with overwhelming or unprocessable data would probably trigger safe mode almost immediately.

So, who is going to make the judgement call as to whether it’s a safe day to jump in the self-driving car and request that it take you to work? Right now, that’s a call we all make by looking out the window at the current conditions, check the weather forecast, look at the road conditions report, etc. and weigh that information against our personal driving skills, comfort level and the capabilities of the vehicle we plan on driving. Similar, albeit somewhat less formal, to what a pilot would do when planning a flight in a conventional aircraft.

My understanding is that currently, most, if not all serious drone aircraft are not operating truly autonomously, but being remotely piloted, essentially by a trained operator remotely controlling the autopilot inputs. Given that it would be undesirable to lose a drone for any reason, including due to environmental conditions, I presume that part of the remote operators’ duties would be to check weather conditions along the routes and the runway conditions at the destinations while making decisions about routing and whether to cancel/abort a given flight.

So, back to the autonomous car fleet that we’re told is going to slowly take over the roadways. Who is going to make that go/no-go decision when the conditions are not ideal? Is that going to be left up to the person that really wants to get to their destination? Is there going to be a mothership monitoring the conditions across the land and remotely parking and shutting down individual cars if the requested trip is deemed unsafe? I guess the same questions can be asked about the fleet of personal, passenger carrying, autonomous drone aircraft that are just over the horizon as well…

[GyvAir]

The robot probably costs more than ten years of salary for this job.

If you take away all the weight and complexity costs of keeping the pilot alive, safe and comfortable in the aircraft, plus informed and interfaced with the systems, how much would the aircraft operator save over the lifetime of the aircraft? Thinking of a purpose built “drone” version of a cargo plane versus a refit such as this. You can strip an awful lot of systems, complexity and weight from a typical airframe if there was no consideration for human life inside for the flights. Considering the lower up-front cost for the aircraft, increased useful load and fewer systems to maintain, it’s a wonder this hasn’t happened sooner in some parts of the world. Maybe finding someone willing to load/unload and fuel the beast in exchange for getting to fly it poses a problem. (Edit: I meant without getting to fly it in exchange)

[Meatservo]

You know what, Gyvair, I think you've won me over with your argument. It's just hard to have been born between two eras. I, along with many of my generation, grew up admiring people like pilots, who were smart, self-reliant, knowledgeable and capable individuals. Aviation was something you would dream about and considered generally worth doing. Now of course the stereotype has reversed- pilots can't navigate, they don't really know how anything works, and they really ought to be discouraged from touching the flight controls because they're liable to screw something up. The tests have gotten more lenient, the requirements have gone down, and somehow there are people out there who are proud of how little it took to achieve their position. They don't realize that the prestige of that position doesn't belong to them, it belongs to previous generations who actually had to make the grade back when flying was real work.

This is probably why I find it difficult to admit that machines are probably the next big step. Pilots have become such ineffectual know-nothings that we probably will be better off when they are sent off to jobs they deserve, like spraying for ants or something.

Aviation will go from an industry that people used to dream about, to being an industry that offers menial work like loading and cleaning and CATSA "officers". Ironically, everybody gets to be a drone.

Except engineers, I guess. Someone will always need to fix the damn things.

[GyvAir]

Unfortunately, the same problems you describe with the up and coming generations of pilots is also starting to affect the maintenance end of things. The level of genuine interest individuals have in actually learning the job has gone down significantly. Trying to attract people with the aptitude and attitude that make for a good aircraft mechanic is getting more and more difficult. There’s no way you can tell me the bar hasn’t been lowered for both acceptance into and graduation from the aviation maintenance programs. So many just want to show up, alarmingly clueless on the basics and be shown exactly what to in step by step, paint by numbers fashion for exactly 8 hours, with no danger of having to make a decision themselves. Yet, they expect to “earn” an AME licence in exactly 2.5 years and an automatic six figure annual income just for showing up.
Maybe someday technology will progress to the point where hangar drones replace mechanics, but I guess I’m just too old to envision what that would look like. Until then though, fortunately not all the aspiring aircraft mechanics are hopeless and the job is still getting done safely in most shops.

[fish4life]

I doubt we will see driverless cars for the pure reason of how many people drive around with a check engine light on or an ABS light on. Can you imagine how much it will cost to maintain a driverless car with all the sensors required????

[Meatservo]

I doubt we will see driverless cars for the pure reason of how many people drive around with a check engine light on or an ABS light on. Can you imagine how much it will cost to maintain a driverless car with all the sensors required????

Actually I think this idea supports driverless cars. Look how long you can drive with that damn light on. Usually it's just a loose gas cap!

[GyvAir]

Half the time that I'm driving around with something not right on my vehicle it's due to laziness or lack of time to get around to dealing with it. Seeing as I could have the car drop me at work in the morning and then drive itself to the repair station and back again, so the technician tighten the gas cap for me without my being unduly inconvenienced, it may get fixed in a much more timely manner!

[ccd]

The problem is, if computer will do my job what can I do to survive? Where can I get money to pay something ?

I think this technology will be used heavily in cargo and logistic but human will be still in charge when they have to move people: I cross my fingers

[Moose47]

G'day

Funny that this topic would come up as I was recently granted a contract by the Deputy Minister of Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. I have spent the last two years working on a prototype drone for use in the aerial appplication of natural fertilizers like cow manure. The Chinese were quite pleased how much it can carry and the wide swath that it can spread. The drone is going to be marketed by Sino State Agricultural Implements as the `Flung Dung Far`.

Cheers...Chris

[GyvAir]

the wide swath that it can spread

Are you sure it's pilotless?

[Moose47]

"Are you sure it's pilotless? "

Yes, it is integrated with an independent auto-pilot wired to a Mongolian GPS system that is also linked to dual Vic 20 clones using nothing but the finest in Chinese computer parts. One of the unique features of my drone is a voice activated 'pile it' feature. I found this out by accident. Things were not progressing very well when on one day while I was screaming "Shit, shit, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit", the drone commenced scooping fresh dung and flying to various spots all around the farm and dropping it in a neat pile..

Cheers...Chris

[confusedalot]

How evenly do they spread the *uh* fertilizer?

This just may be the future.

[Rockie]

Who cares if a bunch of cargo crashes? As long as it doesn't hit any people.

[ccd]

Yes, you are right that is the problem a corporation will love this kind of system because a piece of paper or plastic do not mind if there is a human in control. Cargo is the perfect place where to change humans with automatic system but what are we going to do with those jobless people ?

We will send them to play video games ? A big challenge ahead, not only for pilots

[Moose47]

G'day

Could have sworn that I two or three postings on here but now they are gone!

Cheers...Chris