This is definitely in the works. The biggest problem is convincing the countless local authorities to upgrade their existing traffic systems to support a technology that's not in the market yet.
In this same vein cars with automated parallel/back-in-angle parking.
I think an even more 'sensor fusion' approach needs to be adopted. I think the roads need to be 'smart' or at least 'vocal'. Markers of some kind placed in the roadway to hint cars about things like speed limit, lane edge, etc. Anything that would be put on a sign that matters should be broadcast by the road locally.
Combine that with cameras/lidar/whatever for distance keeping and transient obstacle detection. Then network all the cars cooperatively to minimize further the impacts of things like traffic jams or accident re-routing. Perfect zipper merges around debris in the roadway.
Once a road is fully outfitted with the marker system, then and only then would I be comfortable with a 'full autopilot' style system. Start with the freeway/highway system, get the logistics industry on board with special lanes dedicated to them and it becomes essentially a train where any given car can just detach itself to make it's drop off.
I wonder if you could embed little iron strips in the road in a specific pattern and then put some sort of sensor inside the tires to read the pattern. And then have a warning system to alert people about the transition from “upgraded” to “normal” roads.
It wouldn't necessarily need to be in-road, but there are numerous places where you could adapt. For instance, cats-eyes in the UK (retro-reflective markers) are placed on virtually all motorways at lane boundaries and the car could look for a signature from them (I imagine at night, autonomous cars already use them as a feature for lane boundary detection). Nobody bats an eyelid about re-setting cats-eyes every time a bit of road is replaced. You could also put boundary markers on either side of the road, in the central reservation or something similar.
The idea would to put the smart tech in the car. What's going at the roadside could be made very cheaply and integrated into existing features without needing to rip up the entire road.
Other countries have toll highways which are well maintained, that's another option for installation.
I don't see this happening in rural/country lanes, the cost would be obscene (but again, we do liberally use reflectors in the UK). I also don't see this as a panacea, it would simply be a backup in horrendous weather.
Its going to be significantly more realistic to retrofit existing roads and highways with machine-readable signage and traffic lights (for example, why do cars have to read traffic lights with cameras, why can't the lights broadcast the status locally?)
Then we can run autonomous vehicles (private and corporate) over the same infrastructure.
This is for the auto-brake feature in cars presumably? This is the future. We'll modify our road networks to accommodate vehicles with improved features. One day we'll have radio car-info-beacons along the roadway and wonder why we ever considered only visual road signs.
Honestly, it seems like a more workable solution would be to improve the roadways with built-in beacons to indicate where a road is, and where it isn't. The cars would work only on the improved infrastructure, but they would work. I suppose there is a danger of nefarious actors spoofing beacons to make you drive off a bridge, but it seems far-fetched.
Yeah. We should build lots of enhanced roads. Add in automatic signaling so that the cars know all of the intersections and crossings. Oh, and let's have some bars that come down so that pedestrians don't walk around the path of the cars. And maybe even add little walls around done edges so the cars can't veer off to where there isn't any smart road infrastructure. And since all of this is expensive, let's try and recoup the costs by making the cars much, much bigger and carry lots of people.
They are probably ways to improve existing roads for semi-automated vehicles without creating dedicated infrastructure (which is by itself, not possible anyway, it's kind of hard to create dedicated streets in a dense city for example).
The roads could have captors/sensors/tags added gradually to them. For example, some near field devices planted in the road and broadcasting information such as the name of the road, mile mark, line number/side or traffic lights broadcasting if they are at red or yellow or green or signs such as Stops broadcasting their presence.
This would help autonomous vehicles a lot (instead of having to scan the infrastructure and deduce the environment, the infrastructure will broadcast the environment, at least the static parts, directly), while at the same time not be that costly (compared to the initial cost of the road or even its maintenance costs).
Yep. Or they shouldn't even need to "see" the lanes. The roads could be enhanced with signal transmitters so that the car is "on rails", in a digital sense.
Of course that would require centralization and working with the government. The government has no incentive to do this because it would just create another problem for them (mass unemployment).
Thinking a further bit down-range there probably ought to be Smart Roads that cooperate with the vehicles to a) keep them apart, and b) keep the moving in the proper way.
The solution seems to be to put of more of them so people constantly expect their presence. More modern designs are also capable of calculating average speeds over longer stretches of the road.
I think this is more about last-mile fulfillment.
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