On a grey afternoon in Greenwich, south-east London, Kia Hafezi flips open the boot of a gleaming silver Land Rover and lifts the felt-covered flap inside.
There, where the spare tyre would normally sit, he indicates a tangle of wires and the blinking light of a processing unit. Hafezi works for Bosch, the German company best known for washing machines and dishwashers, but which is also one of the world’s leading parts suppliers for automotive manufacturers.
This isn’t an ordinary car, Hafezi explains, as I take the Land Rover for a brief lap of the streets around Greenwich. It’s one of five special vehicles that have been driving the streets of the London borough over the past year as part of the MOVE_UK project. They’re equipped with front-facing cameras and a host of sensors that can record information about the vehicles’ actions and environment. The equipment in the boot processes that information, and uploads it to the cloud at one-second intervals via an antenna tucked discreetly inside one of the rear windows.
The cars are used by Greenwich council workers as they carry out their jobs around the borough, and have racked up 30,000 miles of driving on public roads. They’re not autonomous in any way – instead, the idea is to use the collected data to help validate the self-driving algorithms that will be used by future vehicles to navigate our cities.
By having ready access to realtime information about how drivers behave, MOVE_UK and its partners, which include Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover and insurance company Direct Line, can compare what a self-driving car would do in a particular situation to what a human would have done. Humans are teaching the cars to be better, smarter drivers.
“We want to be able to look at certain events and see how the driver performed, and how a vehicle would perform,” says Richard Cuerden, research director at the Transport Research Laboratory, an independent organisation seeking to advance intelligent transport.
He brings up an example recorded from an earlier journey taken in one of the Land Rovers. It’s a wintry morning and a cloud of exhaust smoke from a parked car floats across the road in front of the vehicle. The driver simply continued as normal as the smoke drifted apart. But the self-driving algorithm in this scenario couldn’t tell the difference between the smoke and a solid object, so if it had been installed it would have suddenly applied the brakes.
Soon, the cars will also be equipped with more sensors, including radar and lidar, to help them build up a more accurate picture of the world around – and potentially profoundly reshape the way we use the roads. “Future insurance has to understand whether the driver is at fault or whether the vehicle taking control of the situation is at fault,” says Sam Chapman of The Floow, a telematics company that analyses the data.
It’s not just about teaching algorithms how to drive better, but also about developing systems to deal with the combination of human and artificial intelligence, and – crucially – making sure we have the appropriate, just as smart, infrastructure to cope with these new ways of travelling.
Eyes on the road: algorithms learn by observing how humans drive (Credit: Bosch)
Sky taxis
But smart transport isn’t limited to roads. Visitors to Dubai are used to craning their necks skywards for a view of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on earth. On Monday 25 September there was another reason to gaze at the heavens – the first flight of an autonomous taxi that will, supposedly, transform how people travel around the city.
The Volocopter is a driverless lightweight drone with 18 propellers arranged around a wide ring above it. Dubai wants it to become the cornerstone of a flying taxi service – an Uber of the skies. “Implementation would see you using your smartphone, having an app, and ordering a Volocopter to the next Voloport near you,” said Volocopter’s chief executive Florian Reuter at the launch.
“It already is capable of flying based on GPS tracks today, and we will implement full sense capability, also dealing with unknown obstacles on the way.”
The Volocopter drone flew a test flight of 213m, with no passengers. Reuter wants to bring a full service to Dubai within five years. Last year, Chinese company Ehang said it would have drone taxi services up and running in Dubai by the summer of 2018 – but that plan seems to have been quietly shelved.
Although autonomous drones are already being used for military applications, there are huge obstacles to overcome before drone taxis can take off, explains Steve Wright, a lecturer in avionics at the University of the West of England.
The first challenge is to provide batteries that can store enough energy to carry a human around in the air for longer than a short flight. The second, more crucial, hurdle is safety. “I would like to see the drone flying for at least 1,000 hours before I saw a human in it,” says Wright, adding that he certainly won’t be volunteering for the first flight. He says it could be 15 years before drones can be proven safe enough to carry humans as passengers.
As with the cars, smart and connected technology could help solve both problems. The levels of redundancy required to ensure safety could, says Wright, be achieved with swarms of smaller drones. If one drone fails or its battery needs charging, another could soar in to replace it.
“A swarm of drones is a very resilient machine because, if one drops out, another one can step in and take its place,” he says. “That replaces it with a different frustration though – can we be sure that the swarm will behave collectively in the right fashion?”
Again, although the technology is developing rapidly, the challenge for engineers will be to integrate these new forms of transport into an infrastructure that works. Dan Sturges, a futurist and transport expert from Michigan, predicts a move towards a “multi-tiered transportation system”. We might, he says, travel around cities in individual pods that could then slot into larger forms of transport such as trains or planes.
But that would require a huge amount of new infrastructure – and that’s something that’s also a concern with one of the most hyped potential forms of transport, Hyperloop.
Investment is streaming into projects like the Hyperloop (Credit: Virgin Hyperloop One)
Pipe dreams
Will the Hyperloop fire us from London to Edinburgh in 35 minutes in levitating pods, or is it just an expensive pipe dream? It really depends who you ask.
Elon Musk, the technology billionaire who sparked the current interest in a concept that dates back to Brunel, is understandably effusive. “Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome... the only option for super-fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment,” he said when first promoting the open-source idea back in 2013.
A number of companies, governments and investors have climbed enthusiastically onto the high-speed bandwagon. There are dozens of competing projects, with hundreds of engineers and millions of dollars of investments.
Last month, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group announced an investment in Hyperloop One – among the first projects, which is backed by Uber investor Shervin Pishevar. “This is an incredibly innovative and exciting new way to move people and things at airline speeds on the ground,” Branson wrote in a Virgin blog post. “We’re incredibly excited about the technology behind Virgin Hyperloop One and the way it could transform passengers’ lives.”
In Hawthorne, California over the summer, Musk watched teams from all over the world run their technology on a 750m test track at his company’s headquarters. WARR Hyperloop, a team of German students, set a new top speed of 324km/h with their (unmanned) 80kg carbon-fibre pod, but that’s still some way short of the promised 1,200km/h.
Others are more sceptical of the technology and whether it will ever be safe enough for humans. “As the distance of the trials increase there will be many engineering problems to solve including that of managing track alignment,” says Philippa Oldham, head of transport and manufacturing at the IMechE. “Within the UK we would not be able to use any existing transport corridors at these speeds due to their lateral curvature.”
The concept was originally supposed to be a cheaper alternative to a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with Musk stating that it would cost $6bn. Others disagree, and argue that it’s only economically viable for high-speed cargo transport in countries with a low cost of labour.
The future looks bright... but there's plenty of engineering to do (Credit: Bosch)
“It is unlikely to be cheaper and is even less likely to be practical,” says Robert Noland, a professor of transportation planning and policy at Rutgers University, New Jersey. “Most of the costs of construction will be similar to any rail project; this involves right of way acquisition, station costs, etc. For passenger transport these have been criticised as essentially ‘barf’ pods given the high rates of acceleration involved.”
Smart trains could be a better option, and one that’s easier to integrate into the existing transport network. Driverless technology already exists on some metro lines, and digital railway projects will allow trains to communicate directly with each other, which means they could run faster and closer together without sacrificing safety.
Transport technology can undoubtedly be transformative – but whether we’re travelling in driverless cars, soaring through the air in personal helicopters, or being fired through tubes at hundreds of miles an hour, the challenge for engineers is to deliver on the hype.
* Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.