There’s an enormous amount of talk these days about driverless cars. Uber, the company that seeks to put taxis out of business around the world, launched its driverless car fleet in Pittsburgh recently.
Pittsburgh, one of North America’s oldest cities, has a road network that apparently is “organic” in nature, similar to European cities. Straight lines that make sense aren’t that common, so the thinking is that if an Uber driverless car can make it in Pittsburgh, it can make it anywhere.
I took a good look at one of these cars online, a converted Ford Fusion whose roof is festooned with more sensors than either the USS Enterprise of Star Trek fame (fantasy), or a main battle tank like the M1A2 Abrams (reality).
The purpose of these sensors in the driverless car is to ensure the car does not go splat, or cause any humans around it (and their vehicles) to go splat, either. I count at least six forward facing lenses, a LIDAR (laser radar) spinning on the top and numerous radar sensors. The robotic brain of this car has more knowledge of its immediate surroundings than any tank commander could ever dream of.
That’s all well and good, but there’s obviously a reason for this. No one sensor system is infallible, and thus the combination is required for safe operation.
I don’t know what Baltimore’s bug situation is like. Perhaps they don’t have a lot of mosquitoes and dragonflies eating them. But it’s evident the designers have never been to Manitoba.
Ah, yes, Manitoba, the province where humans exist to feed bugs. The capital, Winnipeg, puts out mosquito counts like Alberta follows the price of oil. Some evenings while driving Manitoba highways, I’ve had to pull over and use a squeegee to scrub, and I mean SCRUB, the windshield. That’s because no amount of spitter juice and windshield wiper action will clean my primary sensor device – the forward-looking windshield through which my Mark I eyeball scans.
I’ve heard of entomologists who have studied bugs by examining their splattered remains on the bumpers of semis at truck stops. Oh, look, Mary! There’s a juicy one! I wonder what genus it is?
The Uber cars don’t appear to have integrated windshield wipers on their numerous forward lenses. Perhaps they have a spraying apparatus that is supposed to wash the bugs away. No matter what it is, you can rest assured, it won’t work.
As a photographer, I have to keep constant vigil to ensure my lenses are clean at all times. One speck of dust, at high aperture settings, will show up like globules floating in space, or on a wedding dress. That’s just physics, and there’s not much you can do about that. My application is just making nice pictures, not integral to the decision making process of driving into a deer or child on their tricycle.
So what good are optical sensors if bug splatter will defeat them in short order? If you are operating a driverless semi, who cleans the lenses of the optical sensors for bugs? If it is a human, why don’t you just let them drive? How often are you going to do it? And if their sole purpose is to clean bugs, that seems like a bit of overkill, wouldn’t you say? Hi, my name is Bubba, and I don’t drive the truck, I just clean the bugs.
But it won’t take total coverage of bug guts to defeat an optical sensor. It just takes one. A bumblebee or dragonfly will give that sensor huge blind spots. Multiple sensors, meant to provide the robotic brain with depth perception via stereoscopic imaging, are useless as soon as one has a black eye, or should I say bug eye. Similarly, LIDAR, a spectacular technology, is a pathetic lump if a beetle blocks its laser.
I didn’t even get into bad weather – fog, rain, freezing rain, ice pellets and snow.
Until they’ve solved the bug problem, don’t expect too much of driverless cars.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
