What is Time For a Self-Driving Car?
Time Is of The Essence
We’ve all heard some version of the phrase “Time is of the essence”. Many of us have heard some version of the following phrases, “Time Is On Our Side”; “Make Good Use of the Time You Have”; “Time is Fleeting”; “Time Waits For No-one”; and of course one of my personal favorites, “Time Is What You Make of It”.
Stack up modern mechanisms created to keep track of time, like in the image above, and what do you have? You have a “whole-lot-of-time”, don’t you? Well, that’s more than enough time for a self-driving car, that’s for sure. Self-driving cars deal in denominations of milliseconds, and milliseconds are effectively the “currency” by which transactions occur for the expected results of a particular decision, reaction, activity, activation, or actuation of some-kind.
The Arbitrage of Time
“Time” is the arbitrage for self-driving cars, for autonomous mobility, and for “smart” devices and “connected” platforms. Time is the currency of the future, especially when it comes to data and information. The quicker you have access to a purchase, a stock trade, closing on a potential real-estate deal, the more money you could potentially make. And so it is with autonomous vehicles that make decisions in milliseconds of time.
“Time is of the essence” essentially means that something must be done immediately, or almost immediately, notwithstanding the legal definition. Let’s face it, if there is one thing (or two) anybody and everybody wants more of, its time and money. If you think about it in terms of sports, a split second gave Michael Jordan all the time he needed to defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 5 of the 1989 Eastern Conference First Round Playoffs. Olympian Michael Phelps swam a 1:53.93 to break his own world record of 1:54.58 set in 2001.
Self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles will not only make decisions in milliseconds of time, but simultaneously scan, identify, predict, determine and execute in the milliseconds of time (any motorcyclist knows this very well). But take a it a step further, and you’ll realize just how critical time becomes in the typical modern day metropolises around the globe. The surroundings make for a data rich environment, and for a vast array of data points that are simultaneously all at play — and the self-driving car is constantly evaluating the environment and making decisions within milliseconds of time.
So then, what is time for self-driving cars? Time for self-driving cars is the currency with which the car’s brain (the central computing unit for self-driving) is used to execute literally trillions of operations per second without so much as a even a noticeable difference to the passengers as well as the people located in the immediate and surrounding environment around the vehicle’s route (which could change at any point throughout the duration of the trip — meaning its dynamic in nature).
Time becomes the most essential piece of the entire system that works cohesively to transport the passenger(s) from point of origin to point of destination. We’re talking about the movement of electronic signals at literally the speed of thought, or very close to the speed of thought. Every signal is critical and every decision becomes a command that needs to be executed and completed without failure.
Time arbitrage becomes the ultimate currency as signals are proverbially “flying” around at speeds mimicking the blink of an eye at approximately somewhere in the vicinity of three or four tenths of a second (thats 300 to 400 milliseconds). With the advent of autonomous mobility, signal latency becomes immensely critical and is of utmost importance in the era of self-driving and autonomous vehicle development. With the advent of the driverless automobile, an increased emphasis will be placed on the way in which computing and signal speeds are used in conjunction with one another. Invariably, to enhance communications and data transfer to make the self-driving car execute and deliver the way in which it should, smoothly and safely, without compromise.
My name is Patrick Salem — I am an autonomous mobility professional, engineering and project manager for self-driving cars. I’ve worked in automotive autonomous mobility platform development and strategy, including platform design, systems architecture design, requirements development, commercial aircraft electronics systems development and scope of work documentation. See my other articles on Medium at AutoDriveAI and follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
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