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A pair of vehicles are operating on a route through the city as part of the Baltic state's presidency of the European Union, and have so far managed not to collide with any other road users, national broadcaster ERR reports [gallery itself requires JS from s.err.ee and news.err.ee -- Ed.].
But there have been a number of near misses since the launch on Saturday, ERR says. An eyewitness reports that one of the buses failed to give way to a police car with its lights flashing on Monday; while an ERR photographer saw a bus ignore a red light at a pedestrian crossing, ploughing on regardless of the "surprise" it had provoked.
Despite no-one driving, local traffic law means that there still has to be a responsible person on board, meaning that all passengers are greeted by a host. They've been tasked with explaining the technology to passengers new to the world of autonomous vehicles, ERR says.
Judging from the picture, the buses soothingly seem to be constructed out of Nerf.
Your humble editor lives and works only hundreds of meters from each end of the trial route, so decided to take a quick, and fortunately uneventful, trip on one this (thursday) lunchtime. I now realise there are some things I forgot to snap, such as what the member of staff (a) does, and (b) can do. The answers to which are simple: (a) very little apart from gesticulate to pedestrians who are too frightened to cross in front of the vehicle; and (b) very little at all, as there are no controls. There's a keyboard from which a reset can probably be invoked, but that's it. [Not so - I saw more on my second trip, see below -- Ed.]
I'm happy to treat this as an AMAA (Ask Me Almost Anything), in particular if that means I can waste time on the bus again tomorrow!
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday August 04 2017, @10:51AM (2 children)
The control panel has the following:
A manual/auto switch. This seems useful to get past gawkers.
A stone-age joystick (2 sticks, one for forward/back, one for steering.
An alarm button.
A USB port, not connected to the keyboard as I first thought, it's just an extension cable.
The keyboard is wireless.
An RJ45 port labelled nothing more than "RJ45".
A serial port, presumably RS232, labelled "Diag".
While we were stuck in our cab, the staff from the other bus came to assist, at that point, a USB gizmo (something pretending to be a kbd and/or mouse) could be plugged into the extension lead easily.
No idea how secure the underlying linux is, whether you could actually perform code or config changes.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday August 04 2017, @01:02PM
There was a story about hacking wireless keyboards a while back... one can imagine sitting on the bus with their laptop out typing into a terminal... wasn't that in the movie Speed? Hollywood likes doing remakes nowadays.
Nb: I didn't suggest hacking it. Just that, well ya know might try. It would be interesting to know if they thought of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04 2017, @05:22PM
Waaait a minute...
(Jokes aside, thanks for the AMAA :) )