Nelson Bridwell writes,
The press recently covered
a talk by
Sebastian Thrun at the AAAS conference in
San Francisco where he
suggested that widespread acceptance and usage of self-driving
automobiles will be quite a few years down the road: “By 2030, roughly,
we should be able to deploy this technology on highways, where we would
improve human reliability by orders of magnitude.” I feel that he deserves
additional credit for this unusually conservative forecast that (unlike
too many PR departments) does not make totally unrealistic promises.
However, it has occurred to me that it may be possible to put this
autonomous technology out on the streets much earlier than 2030 if we
were to employ very small (3’) lightweight (200 lb) vehicles for
autonomous
parcel delivery. This could possibly become the “Killer App”
for sophisticated (sorry, Roomba!) mobile robot technology. However, as
Jim McBride, a Ford engineer working on the Urban Challenge, recently
pointed out to me, we had best not label it a “Killer Robot App!”