How Volvo drives a false Autonomy

Going Underground

Rumbling in the mines of Scandinavia, Volvo have been quietly developing underground drones. To claim full autonomy, they’ve attached a LIDAR laserbeak, RADAR, soundwave sensors and optics to a regular diesel FMX. In September 2016, they debuted “the world’s first self-driving truck” releasing video of senior advisor, Torbjörn Holmström, testing out their collision detection capabilities in the flesh.

However, things aren’t what they seem because this new technology is incredibly dependent on a built environment full of squawkbox sensors and surveillance. One also wonders why Holmström had his headlamp turned off for the collision test yet on afterwards.

“There’s a ground traffic controller that sits at the surface that oversees the entire operation, from blast to transport.”

Speaking to Popular Mechanics in May 2016 in a video revealingly titled “Putting the truck before the car”, Holmström describes an operation buzzing with wireless communications. A central traffic management system is used to govern routing and tracks all moving objects whether person or machine. This implies radio beacons for all humans and/or vision systems built into the walls. GPS signals don’t carry a kilometre below ground, but even if they did positioning has inaccuracies up to a hundred metres. This is one reason why “self-driving” vehicles count wheel revolutions to assist self-location. Down in the mine trucks triangulate themselves using a local mesh network of static radio towers whilst broadcasting back their position to a central traffic controller. This can then govern routing, predict collisions and issue commands to even halt vehicles or warn people in dangerous situations.

One should also suspect that their system doesn’t rely on self-reporting alone and the static sensor network constantly tracks moving objects as part of a verification process. In that way Unidentified Ground Objects that can’t, won’t, or refuse to register locations can be monitored for and perhaps neutralised.

The important idea here is that Volvo have been training computerised machines to interact with people wearing radio beacons, hard hats, and full length retro-reflective clothing. What you see is what we get.

Going Overground

Volvo are also keen players in the “road safety” movement. In December 2016, they started a “Stop Look Wave” initiative which is an attack on the minds of children across the world. Translated into at least twelve languages — Korean to Polish — this is a comprehensive package they describe as:

“…a global campaign to keep children safe in traffic [which includes] inspirational training material in an easy-to-use format for parents, teachers, government officials, and other actors to train children…”

Basically the kit includes exercises indoctrinating children to think “road safety” is them having the responsibility of avoiding vehicles. They are familiarised with people needing to wear retro-reflective clothing at all times, day or night, and at the end of their programming they even receive a mock pedestrian license. Transitioning such requirements to cycling would come “naturally” for such students.

Volvo’s Life Paint

Although initially launched a year before, Volvo pushed another “road safety” initiative in December 2016 — one seemingly commercial and this time thrust on cycling. They developed a spray containing retro-reflective plastic micro-beads for fabrics, helmets and shoes. Their advertising video (as sampled below) was eventually banned because they misled the effectiveness on hard surfaces. For that they used a second, which curiously is low-visibility grey during the day but highly white reflective under headlight.

Volvo are very keen for users to spray their shoes, helmet and arms. It’s as if they’ve been training their vision systems to recognise people cycling by their retro-reflective pentagram.

LIDAR stands for “Light Detection and Ranging” which is the same technology that makes digital tape measures, speed cameras, and the looming false autonomy of vehicles plausible. Such devices pulsate invisible light for a receiver to capture any signal reflected back. The time delay is how distance can be measured and intensity can inform on what material got in the way. Problems are immediately apparent when looking at images produced by LIDAR units in cars, because who knows what pedestrian menace could be lurking in the shadows?

If you return to the images of Torbjörn Holmström (or visit the full video if not done so) you’ll notice that his light was off, but he was wearing his yellow suit and helmet. That’s LIDAR in action handing off we presume to echo location for the final metre. It doesn’t need bright visible colours to function nor even daylight, and works best against hard surfaces that don’t scatter or absorb light. Better still is retro-reflectivity — think cats eyes, road signs, license plates, and car head lights — any surface that can reflect light directly back towards the source.

With a reflectivity index of around 5%, tracking the fuzzy hair and black lycra of those jogging or cycling would be like tracking a nightbird for LIDAR systems even in the day. By comparison tarmac has more than three times the luminosity. Holmström may have appeared to us as some shadowy figure but to their machines his signature would be overkill.

Volvo and Microsoft partnership with HoloLens

Volvo say their integration with Microsoft’s HoloLens “mixed reality” headset is about selling and designing cars, but I’m not so sure. There’s the obvious driver vision augmentation where a robocar could illuminate emerging threats a human might not be able to perceive like black ice, debris, or even plot direction routes onto the landscape for them to follow. (I’m sure some of these holo-cinations will also be tailored advertising.)

However futuristic self-piloting concept cars are presented, they always include that male-nipple runt of a steering wheel. Perhaps it’s decorative, or only there for special occasions like those found in underground car parks, secluded country tracks and any other place outside the reach of Google’s Panoptimus Prime.

Other scenarios might include ferrying children around who only have walking licenses (or those that don’t), or when drivers have had one too many for the road. What then? Perhaps it will be like calling a bank: you get a robot doing the easy work but any complex task is outsourced to human intelligence. The same may happen for drones when there are no cheaper alternatives, and the games children are encouraged to play today are likely the jobs of tomorrow.

Motorways for the most part are already sterile environments primed for drones, and that’s where the first test runs of “smart” HGVs are scheduled in earnest starting from next year. Millions of pounds have already been spent installing cameras and electronics to create “smart motorways”, and like down in the mine, they are already governed by ground traffic control. Sign based commands are issued from regional traffic centres to drivers but unlike the perfect drone, a human may not obey. Rather than installing all this expensive infrastructure surely it would be cheaper (for them) to have road users buy heads up display like Google Glass and HoloLens.

Once in urbanised areas driving gets trickier. It could be the case that motorway service terminals of the future could be converted into driver barracks for whenever a drone wants to leave its safespace and is in need of a human chaperone.

Perhaps an environment with even more difficulty is the narrow country lane that might have too low traffic to justify an indulgence of positioning electronics. Here, the potential for roaming auto-tractors or drones filled with fracking fluid makes conflict with vulnerable road users an increasing risk. That could explain the hysterical attacks coming from Irish farming and road haulage associations who want cycling licensed or preferably removed entirely. Likewise that could suggest the real motive being a flurry of professionally made anti-cycling posters that appeared in Dublin around the same time as the attacks. Trinity Mirror was of course on hand to boost negative promotion. Too slow, too fast, a dig at black lycra. Too many Irish cyclists voting for Trump…

Back to HoloLens, when combined with a live data feed this technology would be sufficient to provide remote assistance whenever humans need to pinch back the steering wheel.

Like at the supermarket where an overseer manages perhaps a dozen or so unpaid self-checkout drones beeping through their weekly sundries, the same idea can be applied for any type of vehicle whether carrying vegetable, animal or mineral. This may be the route through which Autono-mutopians solve their biggest problem after cycling: going from zero (false) automation to full decepticon.

As humans increasingly devolve into drones, a transitioning person becomes the weakest link as skills atrophy yet will still be expected to deal with the most difficult scenarios. One can easily imagine this can be solved by having a hive mind of former gaming enthusiasts operating like a silent valet service. The decepticon can be transitioned with a seamless hand-off between car drone to office drone then back again, and the occupants may never need to know.

Such new forms of motoring technology might be reason enough for a full rewrite of the Road Traffic Act and liability issues abound, so all the fuss over Alliston was probably not about a boy.