This blog post wants to shed some light on the importance of cooperation for the deployment of CCAM. As Arriva, we are part of a national collaboration regarding autonomous vehicles to exchange knowledge, best practices and try to get more and more deployment of CCAM vehicles. This National Collaboration of Automatic Public Transport is a cooperation between national and regional governments, public transport businesses, knowledge institutes, public transport authorities and other (legislative) organisations (RDW/TLN).
The goal of this group is to develop and implement promising applications of Automatic Public Transport; and enable and ease the scaling of applications for Automatic Public Transport. In 2040, automatic public transport of people is part of a demand-driven and widely available (collective) transit system. It is connected to traditional public transport and, where traditional public transport is no (quality) option (anymore), offers the same or where possible better quality public transport. Here, automatic public transport is part of regular public transport concessions.
All partners invest resources in studies and living labs throughout the country and everybody gets to benefit from the lessons learned. These national developments also benefit the SINFONICA project to ensure a bright future for CCAM in the whole of Europe.
Yet, there are some issues that we want to address regarding technical and social issues that have been raised multiple times by people that are involved in the deployment.
Sensors and Perception
Self-driving vehicles must continuously scan and interpret the environment using sensors such as cameras, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), radar, and ultrasonic sensors. These sensors need to be accurate and reliable, even in various weather conditions and changing traffic situations.
Decision-making and Planning
The system of a self-driving vehicle must make real-time decisions about speed, lane changes, merging, overtaking, etc. This requires advanced decision-making and planning algorithms that not only ensure safety but also maintain efficiency in traffic.
Safety and Reliability
Self-driving vehicles must be extremely reliable to prevent accidents. Any failure in the system can have dramatic consequences. Developing systems that provide redundancy and have fail-safe mechanisms is crucial.
Legal and Ethical Issues
Acceptance and regulation of self-driving vehicles are also challenges. Legislators need to enact new laws to regulate these new technologies. Additionally, it raises ethical dilemmas, such as the responsible person in the event of an accident involving a self-driving car.
Infrastructure and Connectivity
The infrastructure may need to be adapted to support self-driving cars, such as installing special sensors on roads. Additionally, self-driving systems often require connectivity for updates, map information, and communication with other vehicles and infrastructure.
Public Acceptance & accessibility
The public also must have confidence in self-driving cars before they are widely adopted. This requires education about the technology and evidence of its safety compared to human drivers.
All these factors make implementing self-driving vehicles a challenging. Cooperation between manufacturers, technology companies, policymakers and society as a whole is needed to make the deployment successful. SINFONICA is a great example of a multi-disciplinary collaboration on European scale with the focus on the users of CCAM systems.
Author: the ARRIVA Team
