The robots are coming - technical and societal aspects of autonomous vehicles

Industry

There is a tremendous push to introduce autonomous vehicles. Politicians are offering trials on public roads, companies announce activities in this area in order not to be seen as backwards.

Mixed in with the topic of autonomous vehicles and their challenges are networked vehicles, electric vehicles and expected changes to the usage pattern like moving from car-ownership to shared economies.

Technical challenges are plenty, e.g. how develop AI-algorithms that are trust-worthy enough, how to certify the road-worthiness of algorithms for vehicle licensing, how to trust signals from vehicles where the electronics could be modified, how to find ways to analyse the behavior of AI-algorithms in order to find out, why an accident has happened.

But at the same time, the introduction of new ways of traffic will have tremendous effects on how people move around, it could makes roads much safer, but this is not sure yet. It will change the impotance of public transportation, either strengthen it or weaken it. The need to big investments for networked infrastructure might lead to new forms of public-private-partnership which could lead to new ownership models of what we still consider "public roads".

SlideDeck

PDF icon S5.5 - The robots are coming-aspects of autonomous vehicles_0.3a_30min.pdf

Speakers: