China: Drone Cargo Tested

[ccd]

China: A drone cargo was tested without pilots

A drone cargo was tested in China and there was no pilot on-board. The aircraft flew during 26 minutes, he took off and there was not problem to land safely. It was capable to move 1,5 tons of loading.

End of cargo pilot job ?

[Meatservo]

Nope. Moving 3000lb of cargo on a 26min flight between two airports is my idea of the easiest, most boring job I can imagine. The robot probably costs more than ten years of salary for this job. Robots are probably going to take all the fun, challenging jobs, like cropdusting and flying spaceships. The crappy-paying, boring jobs, unfortunately, will probably always be done by people.

[TailwheelPilot]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQI5LCMURno

This 'drone' is a PAC P750XL modified to be unmanned. Presumably it would not be overly difficult to modify the systems to similar aircraft (ie Caravan, Twin Otter, Y-12, King Air, etc). My gut says that this would be quite easy to use in some places (ie China) where GA is nearly non-existent and the airspace is controlled/restricted while other areas (ie Canada) are less likely to happen for a while yet because GA is already established and there are GA pilots available (admittedly becoming harder to attract and retain). This works to China's advantage since this could give them the ability to continue improving the UAV model in real-world operations and easily make them a world leader in the field.

Just read this article: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomac ... -sea-makes that says a similar thing: use the AT200 (P750XL UAV) to deliver cargo to Chinese installations in the South China Sea where there is minimal traffic before dealing with all of the technical challenges (ie ATC, see-and-avoid - although I wonder what will happen when one flies by a US aircraft carrier and cannot respond to an interception...). One to five hours flying time (not sure how much cargo a P750XL would be able to carry...) and it supposedly can land on dirt tracks or grass fields on islets where there is no airstrip. Air dropping cargo is a planned function for future models for islets that do not have anywhere to land.

[complexintentions]

Nope. Moving 3000lb of cargo on a 26min flight between two airports is my idea of the easiest, most boring job I can imagine. The robot probably costs more than ten years of salary for this job. Robots are probably going to take all the fun, challenging jobs, like cropdusting and flying spaceships. The crappy-paying, boring jobs, unfortunately, will probably always be done by people.

Yep. The irony of technology taking over jobs from humans is that it makes human labour more plentiful, which in turn makes it...cheaper.

[confusedalot]

I think everyone can see that drones are by far the premier moving vehicle; as long as the drones do not hit anything else on their mission.

I would actually like to see drone trucks all over the world. How come this has not happened yet?

Technology is great, the dreams have not quite yet met reality. We should be traveling in all sorts of nifty vessels by now. i wake up in the morning and I see bus drivers, train drivers, taxi drivers, boat/ship drivers, and yesss.....airplane drivers.

How come???

[Spokes]

I don’t think drone trucks are that far away. The google self driving cars already have a safer driving record than human driven cars. Drone surveillance and cargo hauling already happens in war zones. It will come, just a matter of time. Eventually no one will give it a second thought. It will simply be part of the environment.

[Meatservo]

I don’t think drone trucks are that far away. The google self driving cars already have a safer driving record than human driven cars.

I don't know about that. I have never had an accident, either. If everyone else paid the same amount of attention to their driving as the "Google car" handlers pay to their project and its extremely controlled test environment, there would be better stats all around. This is just "Lying with statistics" because if you chose a similar number of human-driven cars and put them through the same paces to amass "data" as the Google ones have been through, you'll probably get a different number, especially if each human driver was being evaluated using the same criteria. There isn't enough data yet to pronounce fully automated vehicles "safer" than anything. There was a semi-comedic attempt to train a dog to steer a car, too. And the dog, in a closed track of course, already has a "safer" driving record than most humans. Except me, of course. I've never had an accident either.

[Diadem]

I don't know about that. I have never had an accident, either. If everyone else paid the same amount of attention to their driving as the "Google car" handlers pay to their project and its extremely controlled test environment, there would be better stats all around. This is just "Lying with statistics" because if you chose a similar number of human-driven cars and put them through the same paces to amass "data" as the Google ones have been through, you'll probably get a different number, especially if each human driver was being evaluated using the same criteria. There isn't enough data yet to pronounce fully automated vehicles "safer" than anything. There was a semi-comedic attempt to train a dog to steer a car, too. And the dog, in a closed track of course, already has a "safer" driving record than most humans. Except me, of course. I've never had an accident either.

Google's cars don't drive in controlled test environments. As of June 2015 they had driven 1.6 million kilometres on public roads, and as of July 2015 they were involved in fourteen accidents; thirteen were caused by drivers of other vehicles, and one was caused by a Google employee who was manually driving the car. Since then, one of the autonomous vehicles sideswiped a bus while attempting to avoid sandbags. Do you really believe that if you drove 1.6 million kilometres you would have a better record than that? Google cars are objectively safer. Computers don't get distracted, computers don't speed, and computers have quicker reaction times than humans by orders of magnitude. Automation is the single most important thing we can do to improve safety on the road and in the air.

[Meatservo]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa. But whatever. Take how many kilometres I HAVE driven, and multiply that by how many "Google" or "Waymo" cars there are, and I'll betcha "meatservos" come in ahead of "googles" every time in terms of safety.

Hundreds of humans have had accidents on test tracks, too. But driving dogs have had ZERO accidents on test-tracks. Therefore, dogs must be safer drivers than humans.

https://youtu.be/4zl8vl5lQnY

[confusedalot]

I don't know how many out there have worked for engineering companies but here goes..

Did two stints as a full flight simulator evaluator, and it is quite an eye opener as far as technology goes. We all think that our products are error free, and that is the biggest misconception ever.

The errors in the flight simulator world number in the thousands, per simulator. Nice high tech product, but far from perfect, worse still, every individual simulator is a different animal, just like every different house is a different animal, and no two simulators have the same problems.

The point I am trying to make is that people are erroneously placing way too much faith in tech. Tech also have their issues, and many of them to boot.

The sandbag versus bus situation is only one of many things that can go wrong, and why in this world would such an error escape the rigors of the tech world? Easy, human error. By the actual designers. Human error also exists in the tech world, even if the engineer types will try to hide or shoot down the very concept.

Ready for much of automation in this world, not quite ready for everything automated is my take...........

[Diadem]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa. But whatever. Take how many kilometres I HAVE driven, and multiply that by how many "Google" or "Waymo" cars there are, and I'll betcha "meatservos" come in ahead of "googles" every time in terms of safety.

Hundreds of humans have had accidents on test tracks, too. But driving dogs have had ZERO accidents on test-tracks. Therefore, dogs must be safer drivers than humans.

https://youtu.be/4zl8vl5lQnY

Your anecdotal "evidence" is not proof of anything if you can't quantify it. I know people who've never been in accidents either, but that's because they barely drive, and I know people who've had an accident every year they've been driving. One person is not representative of the population; I don't know exactly what Google's fleet is now, but it's at least 23, with one at-fault accident in five years in 3.5 million miles driven, according to the company's safety report: https://waymo.com/safetyreport/. According to this article http://mashable.com/2012/08/07/google-d ... yHrSXXdgqE the average accident rate of US drivers is one every 165000 miles.
It doesn't matter if you and your friends don't crash your cars, it doesn't matter if you and your co-workers don't crash planes, because other drivers and pilots do crash. I don't expect autonomous vehicles of any kind to be 100% accident-free, but if they're even 1% safer than human operators, and they're a lot safer than that by a long shot, then they should be in operation as soon as possible. I don't want to have a distracted driver cross the centreline and hit me head-on, or a pilot to lose situational awareness and have an air-to-air with me; I don't care how good a driver or pilot you are, you can't avoid other people's stupidity, and the best way to prevent those accidents is to remove control from those people in the first place.
Now please, if you have actual evidence that shows that humans are ever safer than computers in the operation of vehicles, present it to us. Not that humans can be safe, or that computers can never have errors, because this isn't a binary situation where computers have to function 100% effectively or we won't use them; show us that the use of computers won't improve our safety even marginally compared to letting humans perform the same tasks.

[confusedalot]

Tell me why my computer constantly gets updates and patches for errors. Once again, the confidence in tech does have some merit, but it is far from the perfection that many believe.

[Cliff Jumper]

No one said it was perfect.

It's just a rate.

If people kill 99 people for every million miles driven (made up) and computers kill 98, then computers are safer.

Rates obviously do vary with sample size, but the sample size is getting larger every day.

[Diadem]

Tell me why my computer constantly gets updates and patches for errors. Once again, the confidence in tech does have some merit, but it is far from the perfection that many believe.

Humans don't get updates and patches for errors. Humans make mistakes constantly. Computers are far more accurate, respond far faster, and make far fewer errors than humans. It doesn't matter that computers aren't perfect, it just matters that they're better than humans. Why is it all or nothing with computers, but humans can screw up over and over and you're okay with them being in the cockpit?

[Meatservo]

Dogs, too. By your own metrics, dogs are safer drivers. Demonstrably. Why is it OK to have humans in the cockpit when we could have dogs?

Bullshit aside, as I'm sure you know, computers don't actually "do" anything. All the actions taken by computers are actually actions that are "done" by a human, at some point in the past, in anticipation of a particular confluence of events. The only thing a computer can do is recognize, (if you want to call it "recognition", which I don't because it implies "cognition" which is beyond the scope of any if/then/else parameters of computer ability) anyway all a computer can do is sense an event and react to it in the way that it was instructed to react by a human who, at some point in the past, anticipated that event.

So they're not better at things than humans. Let's make that clear. The extent of a computer's ability is to mechanically process input faster than a person. Any activity that requires actual interpretation and thought is beyond the scope of machine logic. There are those who believe that flying is one of those activities. Driving is different. The main source of danger i. the driving world is the erratic behaviour of other drivers, and the erratic behaviour of sandbags apparently. Until the other drivers are as utterly predictable as a computer, the danger will still be there. I consider automated driving to be an "all or nothing" situation. The risks in flying are different and require forethought and recognition, which are beyond the scope of a computer in anything other than the most benign environment.

[GyvAir]

I'm not sure how many kilometres I've driven. But yeah, I've never been in any accident that was caused by another driver, either. Obviously I'm a defensive-driving superhero. And, because I'm a person and not a psycho, I'll hit the sandbags to prevent hitting a bus instead of vice-versa.

I’ve read enough of your posts in the past to be pretty sure you’re just fishing for an argument, but I’ll bite anyway.

Yes, you may be among the best drivers in the world... right now. But, what about when you're a little older? When your reaction times start to slow, senses start to fail you and your judgement starts to fail you as well? Including your judgement as to when it's time to give up driving. What if you know it’s time to give up driving, but you don’t want to? You might be pretty happy to be able just jump in your favorite seat in the AutoCar and let it take you to the grocery store or your bridge game or wherever.
As Diadem stated already, it's not about the best, most responsible and able drivers on the road. It's about the average driver. The average driver that has rear ended the Google fleet cars 8 times as of 2015. Even the most attentive of defensive drivers don't generally have a lot of options for avoiding being rear ended.

As far as the abilities and reliability of the systems goes, this is young technology. It will only improve with time and experience. Yes, it’s limited now, but this is not the final version. Even the “autopilots” being marketed now and in the next few years will be quickly outdated with much more capable and reliable versions almost immediately. Software and hardware is going to constantly evolve for the better, guaranteed.

People saying now that self-driving cars aren’t going be a big part of personal transportation in the near future (with all their advantages and disadvantages) is like saying back in the early 80s that the personal computer is just a fad that will never really catch on.

[GyvAir]

Driving is different. The main source of danger i. the driving world is the erratic behaviour of other drivers, and the erratic behaviour of sandbags apparently. Until the other drivers are as utterly predictable as a computer, the danger will still be there. I consider automated driving to be an "all or nothing" situation.

As someone who drives across the GTA on the 401 all too regularly, I would be far less concerned by a few thousand current technology self-driving cars on the highway around me, than the fleet of 100% meat-driven cars that I currently have to contend with.

[Meatservo]

I’ve read enough of your posts in the past to be pretty sure you’re just fishing for an argument, but I’ll bite anyway.

That particular statement is an example of a logical fallacy known as "ad hominem". The trouble with this kind of conversational strategy is that it pretty much negates everything that you have to say afterwards.

If you've read my posts in the past, you may have noticed I have a propensity for picking apart the logical errors in the statements that people make.

So the Google fleet keeps getting rear-ended. That's interesting. A repetetive undesireable outcome to a particular circumstance. Seems like a statistically significant number of drivers were expecting the car in front of them to do something which it then failed to do.

[GyvAir]

Seems like a statistically significant number of drivers were expecting the car in front of them to do something which it then failed to do.

Their response to it failing to meet their expectations was to drive into it?

I've never rear ended anyone. The few times when I came closer than I care to admit to rear ending someone was due entirely to allowing my attention to be drawn to things not relevant to the task at hand - driving - nothing to do with the car ahead doing something unexpected, or failing to do the expected. I expect cars to stop in front of me. I expect them to sometimes stop suddenly and without warning or reasons immediately apparent to myself. However, being human, I sometimes look away longer than I should.

However, I have been rear ended numerous times, usually by people with their heads buried in their phones. A couple times by people assuming that because traffic had moved forward 20 feet, it would continue to move forward.

I’m not sure what the Google cars could do to be immune to the above scenarios, except perhaps make sure they are only being followed by other Google cars that would be paying 100% attention 100% of the time and making logical decisions and reactions based on fact, rather than expectation and desire.

[Meatservo]

That's funny... I've never been rear-ended. I'm assuming it's partly because of my predictable driving behaviour. Sometimes for instance, I keep on going when the light turns yellow, because I know that I would otherwise have to stomp on the brakes to make sure I stop on the line before the light turns red, or else end up fouling the intersection. I wonder what the humans who are directing the reactions of the google-bot have directed it to do in this situation. Judgement is utterly beyond the scope of an automated system, therefore there must be a set of rules in place. I wonder if these rules are entirely realistic. I mean, It shouldn't be the responsibility of human drivers to anticipate the lack of flexibility on the part of a cam-driven automaton.