Blind Coloradoan August 7, Riding a Self-Driving Bus

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Blind Coloradoan Blog August 7

Writer, aggregator Kevan Worley. Contributing editor Dan Burke.

Here is what you need to know

Riding a Self-Driving Bus
By Curtis and Peggy Chong

From the aggregator: The National Federation of the Blind broke ground on our Jernigan Research and Training Institute during the Fall of 2001. At that time, the organization knew we needed this expanded space in Baltimore to create imaginative initiatives. We weren’t quite sure what the precise nature of that work would be. Training? Research? We knew that whatever we did with the Jernigan Institute it would be driven by the hopes, dreams, and prodigious imagination of the organized blind movement. During the groundbreaking, Dr. Maurer spoke of the challenge and creativity with which we would fuel the mission of the institute. During that address and in the 2002 banquet keynote, he referenced the possibility of what later in the decade would become our Blind Driver Challenge. At that time, most people still thought of personal vehicles that could be driven by computer was the stuff of Science Fiction. But not long after Dr. Maurer’s remarks, we in the Federation began serious work on a car that could be driven independently by an individual who was blind. Our current president, Mark Riccobono, drove the vehicle prior to the Rolex 24 at the world-famous Daytona Speedway in early 2011. Our vision was not to develop a car that would be operated by computer. Rather, it was to harness computer technologies that would provide a blind driver the information needed to actually drive the car independently. We were developing and demonstrating technologies that could allow blind people to participate on terms of equality. The remarks made by Mark Riccobono at our 2011 National Convention are instructive and inspiring.

https://www.nfb.org/sites/www.nfb.org/files/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm11/bm1108/bm110808.htm

Here we are in 2019 and much has happened in the world of the “self-driving vehicle.”  Today, we have all heard of the work being conducted by Uber, Ford, Google, DARPA, Tesla, and so many others to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles. Some of us have even taken a ride. At last month’s National Federation of the Blind convention in Las Vegas, Lyft was demonstrating their autonomous vehicle at the Mandalay Bay. Some of us were lucky enough to try the experience. I rode in the back of Lyft’s autonomous vehicle with the First Lady of the NFB, Melissa Riccobono. It was a kick! At this point the Lyft vehicles being tested in Las Vegas still have human drivers who can grab the wheel in case the technology goes haywire.

Recently, Curtis and Peggy Chong took a ride in the robot bus operated by Denver’s Regional Transportation District, RTD. Here is what they say about the adventure.

For years, we in the National Federation of the Blind have been talking about self-driving vehicles (driverless cars) that can take blind people from place to place, offering us the promise of greater independence than we have today. When we think about this type of vehicle, we imagine an empty car controlled by a computer with no conversational capacity and zero personality. We are concerned that blind passengers who cannot see a visual display will have no ability to tell the car where they want to go. Some of us who have had to solve problems caused by freezing computers and programs that crash for no discernible reason have nightmares about self-driving vehicles barreling down the freeway and suddenly stopping when the controlling system decides to go offline.

When we heard that the Regional Transit District of Denver (RTD) was operating an autonomous bus (see the article in Streets Blog Denver called Ride the Robot Bus published January, 22, 2019) as a pilot, we decided to give it a try before the pilot ended. So, on a hot and muggy August 2, we took the train to the RTD station at 61st and Peña and stepped aboard this driverless vehicle.

 We entered a small "pod" containing six passenger seats: six seats in the front facing toward the rear and six seats at the back facing towards the front. There was no steering wheel per se, no gas pedal, and no break. Everything was controlled with two computer tablets. We were greeted by a friendly "safety ambassador" who was more than happy to answer any of our questions about the system. He told us that the self-driving bus travels along a predetermined route with only two stops. There are no traffic signals along the route, but there are some turns that need to be negotiated, and there are vehicles moving along some of the streets along which the bus must travel. From time to time, the safety ambassador is asked by the software whether it is safe for the bus to move forward; this usually happens at a four-way stop sign or when the bus is turning into a driveway. The safety ambassador told us that while the vehicle was capable of making these decisions on its own, regulations still required a person to make the go or no-go decision.

When the bus reaches one of the two stops along the route, the door is opened automatically, and the system stops doing anything unless or until the doors are closed. Alongside of the door are three buttons arranged vertically. The topmost button closes the door, the middle button deploys a ramp for wheelchair users, and the bottom button puts the bus in touch with a central dispatcher or some other emergency contact person.

Before the bus starts to move, it rings a bell before moving forward. Whatever happens, if the software is in doubt about what to do, the vehicle will either slow down or come to a complete stop. If the bus's sensors pick up nearby objects, the vehicle will slow down, and if a nearby object is too close, the vehicle stops moving.

The vehicle maintains what is called "local awareness" using GPS technology and a highly detailed internal map of the area. It travels a predetermined route that has been programmed into its memory using an incredible amount of detailed information. It is equipped with a variety of sensors and cameras. What we found interesting was that the vehicle itself did not talk. For example, when the doors opened for us, there was no announcement about the vehicle's route, and when we stopped at the other end of the route, the only way we knew where we were was when the safety ambassador told us. We found this surprising for something as sophisticated as a vehicle that can literally drive itself along a predetermined route.

All in all, we traversed the 15-minute route three times and learned quite a bit about the current and future potential for autonomous vehicles. Here are some of our thoughts.

1.  Self-driving vehicles do not really drive themselves. A human being still needs to operate the controls for situations that are not programmed into the software. It is not likely that we will ride vehicles without human operators—at least not for the next decade at least.
2. The state of autonomous vehicle technology is nowhere near the point where a blind person can get into the car and simply tell it where he or she wants to go. What appears to be maturing is the technology to control vehicles that travel along a fixed route with a minimum of unpredictable factors (e.g., people) getting in the way.
3. We, the blind, must continue our efforts to encourage (if not require) efforts to support non visual forms of communication and access for any autonomous vehicle that makes its way into the general community. If we fail in this effort, the autonomous vehicles of tomorrow will not provide us with the independence and mobility we want.
4. Finally, we urge our colleagues in the Federation to be ever vigilant and to do what we have always done in the National Federation of the Blind: monitor what is going on with autonomous vehicles, ride them whenever you can, and let the powers that be know what does and doesn't work for us.