Over these few months with the advancement of technology in autonomous cars, we have been witnessing major changes with respect to their behavior in different situations. Building an autonomous car is in itself a big deal, from managing the in style of the car to equipping it with cameras and LIDARs, everything is done well with collaboration. No automobile company can do the task of building up an autonomous car by themselves and thus it required a lot of collaboration with tech companies as well.
Now, on road situations are typical than this. By far everyone noticed that almost all situations are covered, but Renault came up with the concept of managing the Toll booths with autonomous cars. This was a bigger question now how to pay toll when you are inside an autonomous car?While dealing with situations like how to spot a pedestrian or how to avoid accidental situations, the companies overlooked the fact that how will an autonomous car stop and pay for toll when all it was built was for humans to handle.
To solve the nitty-gritty aspects of this problem, Renault recently collaborated with a French Road toll operator Sanef that manages around 1700 km of road in France. This is being tested in A13 freeway in Normandy since 2016 and is expected to pack up by 2018.
As per Renault’s Mathew “Maximizing safety for drivers, passengers and others with autonomous cars requires several stakeholders in both government and the private sector working together, each bringing unique expertise.”
How will this work?
Well, reportedly, the system will use a short range Wi-Fi connection that will automatically sensor an upcoming toll booth and indicate the car about its presence, 1 km in advance. Using sensors and HD map solutions, the car then will automatically slow down its speed and will follow the toll lane of automated cars. This modification in cars is not tough to embrace and requires very less amount of trouble to make changes in the design part.
What are the issues still?
The major issue that follows is the fact that Sanef’s toll system in France is only specific to Renault vehicles with this collaboration. In US itself, there are various kind of toll systems, EZ pass being the largest system managed in sixteen North East and north central states.
How can we curb this issue then?
Either one way we can make a single standardized toll system that works the same all over. Like suppose EZ pass system is adapted as the toll system for every country then paying toll and traveling for autonomous cars will be easy and quick.
Secondly, auto license plate recognition can be done. This is done by scanning the license plate number with the help of sensors and cameras to capture the license plate number. The ones found at wrong situations will be billed by the Turnpike authority or any in such case.
Looking at various situations, it is not going to be an easy ride for the autonomous cars. We have been living in a world where doing cashless payments is also not so full fledged now. Then giving over the control of your car to a robotic technologies will be hard to grasp. Apart form humans, there will be conditions and situations which are still under observation as to how to cope up with them. If, this is the future then we need to collaborate and look out for it!