The Changing Safety Paradigm of Autonomous Trains
Self-driving vehicles are already on our roads and expected to be common in a few years. Tesla projected to have its self-driving car taxi by 2020. Autonomous transportation also expands beyond self-driving vehicles to automated trains. REM (Réseau express métropolitan) in Montreal, Canada, is preparing to launch the first-ever automated self-driving metro experience by 2020. In light of autonomous transportation, a paradigm shift for safety, in particular of pedestrians, is required.
The REM will include 26 stations that will discover the Greater Montreal area with 67 km of tracks. It will be the most significant public transit project that has ever undertaken in Quebec. It is expected that the first trains should start running in 2021 from the South Shore to Bonaventure Central Station. The public transit trains will be 100% electric and automated.
Self-driving vehicles, such as the REM, do not require human drivers to participate or even take control to operate the vehicles safely to some extent. It is combined with sensors and software to control, navigate and drive the vehicle. The software then plots a path and sends the instruction to the vehicles, which control acceleration and braking. However, many tech companies such as Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and Aurora have implemented these software’s but never managed to solve the trolley problem.
However, trains in Montreal are built with open tracks. The open track metro systems are much susceptible to people to cross before a train approaches. Human behaviours are the most difficult to read as self-driving cars cannot currently read and understand a person, whether they are walking, texting, crossing, or even riding a bike. These situations are vital to the safety of pedestrians and passengers.
With self-automated trains, it would be even more challenging to control these situations. According to cbc.ca, there were about 246 accidents occurred in the metro, which is about 25% more than the year before.
It would be difficult for automated vehicles to react and predict these situations as they are not able to adapt to the global problem-solving capabilities to identify human behaviours and prevent severe injuries. Therefore, placing a software measure that will allow them to generalize human behaviour and improvise in unusual circumstances, it will handle the elements and develop a safer outcome for passengers and pedestrians.
Ensuring safety in automated vehicles for the pedestrian can be very challenging, in terms of the trolley issues and preventing severe injuries. It would demand specific tools to develop the model that will provide safety from the human behaviour’s perspective rather than the automated vehicles.
Safety is an overarching concern. Many pedestrians lost their lives in motor vehicle collisions and self-driving vehicle accidents in the United States. Although self-driving cars could hypothetically reduce that number and even eliminate it, as the software provides to have fewer human errors although, the trolley issue is still a significant concern.
!important, a Montreal tech company, conceived a new solution that will solve the trolley problem and even eliminate fatalities. The system is embedded with artificial intelligence tools, that will take into concern the safety of pedestrians by detecting the location of the pedestrian, which will send a two-way signal from the IoT tool to the cloud, that allows autonomous vehicles to slow down and avoid a collision. The software model will have P2X (Pedestrian to everything) and P2V (pedestrian to everything) solutions for the automotive industries. This will allow REM and many other sectors to break down and understand the pedestrians. This solution will assist the automotive industries in ensuring the safety of pedestrians and even employers on the track.
The only way to solve these issues before they arise is by deeply understanding the human behaviour and comprehensively using AI software that will allow autonomous vehicle companies to achieve their promise as a revolution in transportation and developing safety measures for the pedestrian.
