Quote:
Originally Posted by Commander Wallace
I'm also wondering how good the sensors are that directs control of the rig in the event that the rig encounters bad weather or Snow-white out conditions.
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Those are very good question. In rapid transit (subway/metro) automation one of the biggest challenges has been snow. in many cases if you want to remove human from the loop then train should have ability to detect obstacles in track and that isn't too big trouble when weather is nice. However once you insert snowing into picture, computers are in trouble trying to differentiate snowflakes from real obstacles. No doubt they will eventually solve thos problems, but is this technology really ready for public roads?
There are many rapid transit lines employing automatic train operation (ATO), but not so many have completely unmanned trains and those tend to be in countries where inclement weather is not so much problem. For example although Central, Northern, Jubilee and Victoria lines of London Underground have ATO they still have human train operators onboard partly because system does not have obstacle detection capability.