Serendipity is awesome! It always makes me believe I am on a
right track. The topic for today was set 3 posts ago, and just this morning I
found an item in the April 2013 Wired issue about exactly this topic! (I wrote
this 2 weeks ago, but we are moving and life got a bit hectic for a while,
sorry for the hiatus.) It’s a response to a reader’s question about Autonomous
Vehicle safety:
- One key point in favor of Autonomous Vehicles is that “30% of traffic fatalities involve drunk drivers, while 10% are due to drivers distracted by phones, chatter, or food.” Autonomous Vehicles won’t be drunk or “unwrap hamburgers while merging.”
To see a good description of the power of coordinated
Autonomous Vehicles, watch this TED2012 talk Swarms
of helicopters. To see an example of what they can do, here is an excerpt
from that video play
music. If you Google “copter swarm” you will see amazing examples of:
Coordination, Communication, and Autonomy.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, Curator of the
TED Conference, and innovator in drones, predicts that these helicopter drones
will solve some of the challenges I have been discussing. In the article How I
Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom, Chris points out that you
can buy a quad-coptor on Amazon, and “For less than $30, you can buy a little
circuit board that can connect it to an autopilot.”
But I don’t want those rotors anywhere near my face, and I
really hate to think of 3-dimensional traffic jams, so let’s see what else we
can do with these same technologies with the approach I’m describing.
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