When will unmanned vehicles appear on the roads of our country and what is needed for this

The pandemic has hit self-driving car developers hard. But forced self-isolation can spur the development of autonomous transport, as it allows minimizing human-to-human contact.

It seems that during self-isolation, when traffic congestion has decreased significantly, the ideal time has come for active tests of unmanned vehicles. However, the world’s largest companies — Waymo, Uber, Aurora — temporarily suspended testing back in March. The problem is that today a self-driving car does not mean “a car without a person.” In most cases, an engineer is still behind the wheel, ready to take control in the event of a failure. But even if there is no person in the car, he is always there: he prepares the car for the trip, fills it up, and takes it to an unmanned route.

However, work on the development of unmanned vehicles in the world has not stopped. During the pandemic, most developers focused on improving algorithms and analyzing information previously collected on the roads. One of the most relevant areas of work was the training of drones in simulations. By simulating the traffic situation in the “brain” of the car, you can drive millions of virtual kilometers and work out the most unexpected traffic situations that are rarely encountered on real roads. Now the main issue is to combine the experience gained by the drone in the real world and in the virtual one.

But not all developers were forced by the coronavirus to switch to virtual reality. Some companies are returning cars to the streets after the first shock. Moreover, the formats for using drones are not limited to banal taxis: in China they are used to disinfect streets, in the USA, Cruise and Pony.ai companies deliver food and purchases from supermarkets, and Navya autonomous shuttles in Florida deliver coronavirus tests for the Mayo Clinic.

In our country, the role of drones in the fight against the pandemic is not yet so obvious, but the first cases are appearing in our country. For example, at the end of April, Kamaz tested unmanned trucks in the Far North, and after it, in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug, an unmanned electric GAZelle from a team of engineers from NSTU, the finalists of the Up Great technology competition, successfully covered more than 90 km of the road. “Winter City”. Within the framework of NTI Autonet, the possibility of using drones in our country to disinfect streets is now being discussed, and the “younger brothers” of unmanned vehicles – mobile robots – are already actively fighting the virus: in Sberbank, a special robot disinfects office space using ultraviolet lamps and at the same time makes sure that no one was exposed to harmful radiation.

Most of these cases are examples of situational response to sudden market needs. There is a risk that some of them will lose their relevance when we start leaving our homes again. However, thanks to the pandemic, drones are one step closer to being no longer a frightening exotic and becoming a familiar part of urban life. The key change is in the mentality. A year ago, many were wary of the idea of ​​getting into an unmanned taxi. Today, some of us would prefer not to have a driver in a taxi at all. This psychological shift is of great importance not only in the context of the development of unmanned vehicles, but also in many other technological areas. Any service that can be provided without contact with another person can firmly enter our everyday life in a new format: remote, robotic, unmanned.

The current moment for unmanned vehicles is extremely important – in a year we will see how much the index of people’s readiness for the appearance of unmanned vehicles on the roads will change.

Of course, our loyalty to the robots alone will not be enough. Still, the current developments are not ready to drive completely independently, say, in Moscow. When this happens – experts disagree: someone is sure that in ten years the drone will no longer be a curiosity, others insist that this will take at least 30 years. The crucial question is, what other problems need to be solved to get drones into the city?

• First, obviously, the technology must be developed. Hundreds of engineering teams are working on this in the world today. In our country, there are at least a dozen developers who are already ready to introduce unmanned vehicles into commercial operation. And it’s not just Yandex. A good level of development of autonomous driving technologies is demonstrated by developers from St. Petersburg StarLine, MADI, Avto-RTK, BaseTracK. At the same time, some are following the path of introducing various assistants and computer assistants into ordinary production cars and gradually replacing the driver with them in different traffic situations. Others immediately create autonomous vehicles and gradually expand their habitat: from rail transport to autonomy in limited areas, then in separate urban areas and in entire cities.
• The second important issue is that someone should be responsible for possible violations and damage caused by an unmanned vehicle. And the problem here is not that we are preparing in advance for the fact that drones will “harm” us. And that we, perhaps, for the first time are faced with the fact that a moving object may not have an operator. This issue lies at the intersection of interests of developers, authorities, insurance companies and potential drone users. So far, there is no unequivocal answer to it in any country in the world. Rather, it lies in the legal, and not in the technological plane.
• Third, we must prepare our streets for drones. And this task may turn out to be even larger than the previous two. Obviously, a self-driving car will need high-precision city maps, digital road infrastructure (for example, traffic lights reporting their signals via wi-fi). But not only. An autonomous car without a driver inside will also need to refuel, pay for parking, and so on. And this will also require appropriate technological solutions.

For the emergence of an unmanned vehicle in Moscow, not only an autonomous car as a physical object is needed, but also a new, digital city in which unmanned vehicles will be one of the elements of a large technological mechanism in the service of human interests. The challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and the likelihood of similar situations repeating in the near future is a good incentive to accelerate the creation of such conditions.

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