Walt Disney World to test driverless shuttles

[Hummingbird]

I'm not sure if this belongs in here or rumors but I thought it was interesting and worth the share

Walt Disney World is planning to test driverless shuttles that would carry passengers through parking lots, the Los Angeles Times reports.

• LA Times reporting that Disney World will test autonomous shuttles
• Shuttles would initially transport cast members
• ATTRACTIONS INSIDER: Your all-in-one source for news, pictures and video from Florida’s theme parks. Just go to our Attractions Insider page. Sign up to get breaking theme park news alerts and subscribe to our newsletter, Theme Park Roundup, delivered to your inbox or mobile phone.

The pilot program, which has not been officially announced by Disney, would begin later this year with park employees, also known as cast members, the newspaper said. Autonomous vehicles could carry them through cast member-only parking lots.

If the pilot program is successful, the driverless shuttles would begin transporting park visitors sometime in 2018, the Times reports.

Disney is reportedly in talks with two manufacturers: Phoenix-based Local Motors and Paris-based Navya. Both companies design autonomous, electric-powered shuttles that can hold up to 15 people. In the case of Local Motors' Olli model, the exterior can be customized to fit the style of the city or area where it will be used. Essentially, Disney would be able to theme the shuttles for each theme park.

Shuttles can hold up to 15 people and travel at speeds of up to 25 mph or more. To navigate, the vehicles would come equipped with radars, lasers and cameras, all programmed to keep the shuttles in a designated zone.

Autonomous shuttles are nothing new. Several companies specializing in driverless shuttles began testing in major U.S. cities last year, including Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas.

After news broke of a gondola system being developed at Disney World, the company seems poised to transform its transportation system. That new aerial transportation system could connect the theme parks to nearby hotels.

The changes come as Disney prepares to open a Star Wars expansion at Hollywood Studios in 2019. Other road projects are also in the works to help accommodate the expected influx of traffic for the upcoming land.

http://www.baynews9.com/content/new.../disney_world_autonomous_shuttles_report.html

 

[GreatLakes]

The interesting part of the equation will be insurance. My wife works for a very large insurer that does a lot of auto insurance and they are, as of now, denying insurance on anything self driving related. I'm wondering if that piece of the puzzle is worked out or one of the things still pending.

 

[IrishNYC]

The interesting part of the equation will be insurance. My wife works for a very large insurer that does a lot of auto insurance and they are, as of now, denying insurance on anything self driving related. I'm wondering if that piece of the puzzle is worked out or one of the things still pending.

Is it possible that Disney self-insures? My husband's employer does for a lot of their operations.

 

[NotUrsula]

Disney does self-insure, or did, as of a couple of years ago.

I wonder if they will set up dedicated lanes for these? I trust self-driving vehicles in dedicated lanes much more than I trust them on open multi-lane roadways. I don't worry so much about what they will hit, so much as what might hit them. I know there are plenty of sensors, but the sensors tend to have issues with other vehicles that are not acting in the expected way for the environment, such as those that run red lights at higher-than-normal speed.

 

[MillauFr]

I don't worry so much about what they will hit, so much as what might hit them.

Can't the self driving cars react quicker and make better decisions on evasive actions than human drivers?

 

[MillauFr]

The interesting part of the equation will be insurance. My wife works for a very large insurer that does a lot of auto insurance and they are, as of now, denying insurance on anything self driving related. I'm wondering if that piece of the puzzle is worked out or one of the things still pending.

Isn't the problem determining who the insuree is with self driving cars? Are you insuring the people inside the car, the car owner, or the car manufacturer? Once these issues are sorted out legally the insurance rates on the self driving car will be a fraction of what you are paying now for insurance.

 

[NotUrsula]

Can't the self driving cars react quicker and make better decisions on evasive actions than human drivers?

At this point, not reliably. There have been several accidents where a self-driving car was broadsided or rear-ended by a human driver who ran a stop, often as the SD car was stopped to make a left turn. As I understand it, the biggest issue is that computers have a problem with "rock and a hard place" decisions; if you have no choice but to get into an accident of some sort, the computer has difficulty choosing the best-case scenario, because they are programmed to always avoid and to follow traffic regulations, so for instance, they would have difficulty in driving up onto a curb to avoid a pedestrian.

In addition, there are limitations that can be caused by inclement weather and poor road condition; they have been known to drive into deep potholes and brake suddenly in heavy rain (because their maps don't show the pothole, and the sensors are perceiving the rain as a solid obstacle.)

 

[GreatLakes]

Isn't the problem determining who the insuree is with self driving cars? Are you insuring the people inside the car, the car owner, or the car manufacturer? Once these issues are sorted out legally the insurance rates on the self driving car will be a fraction of what you are paying now for insurance.

That is part of the problem, yes. If Google programs a car that causes damage or a loss of life are they liable for bad code? When (and not if as it is a certainty it will happen) a bug in the code is leveraged by a hacker to cause a crash is the manufacturer liable because they should have had more secure code? All interesting questions yet to be answered.

Can't the self driving cars react quicker and make better decisions on evasive actions than human drivers?

Not really, no.

While a computer may not suffer from the bad traits of a human such as distracted driving we are decades away from the ability for a computer to reason as a human would and make an on the fly decision it was never programmed for. I don't see a self driving car passing the Turing test in my lifetime and possibly not in my 3 month old son's either.

 

[MillauFr]

I don't see a self driving car passing the Turing test in my lifetime and possibly not in my 3 month old son's either.

Humans keep failing the tests and result in 40,000 deaths and millions on injuries on US roads every year. I really don't understand why we tolerate such a high death rate from human drivers when we have self driving cars that could cut the death rate. Self driving cars have a far lower fatality rate per miles driven than human drivers.

 

[NotUrsula]

Humans keep failing the tests and result in 40,000 deaths and millions on injuries on US roads every year. I really don't understand why we tolerate such a high death rate from human drivers when we have self driving cars that could cut the death rate. Self driving cars have a far lower fatality rate per miles driven than human drivers.

I agree that a Turing Test (as originally designed) shouldn't be the standard for self-driving vehicles -- since the Turing Test is all about fooling a human into thinking that the machine is another human. No one is going to be fooled into thinking that in the case of a vehicle.

I've encountered Google's driverless map cars in traffic; they are very obviously not driven by a human. For one thing, they tend to go slower than the traffic flow, which makes sense when the mission is to photograph landmarks. The trouble is, a car that moves under the speed limit when every vehicle around it is exceeding it is acting like a rolling roadblock, and IME, the only way that a rolling roadblock doesn't cause reckless driving by those around it is when the blocking car has a light bar on top. Every time I've encountered a map car, I've also witnessed people doing dangerous high-speed lane changes to dodge around it.

I'm not against driverless vehicles at all. I just happen to think that at their current state of the art, their ability to manage emergency avoidance is not quite good enough for prime time, so to speak. Right now, I think they are best confined to fixed paths where human drivers are less likely to run into them.

Note that I think there is a difference between a truly driverless vehicle such as the shuttle Disney is testing, vs. a vehicle that has a self-driving mode but which expects and accommodates a human behind the wheel. The second group are usually fine in traffic as long as the driver remains alert.

 

[jimmymc]

I think WDW property is the perfect place to introduce self-driving vehicles. It's a (relatively) small, contained property that can be well mapped and possibly have dedicated infrastructure. I would love to use them the next time I visit.

 

[charmed59]

There are quite a few driverless cars that are being used to ferry humans in the California Bay Area. I've seen them on major roads, but I have not seen them on freeways. They seem to go the speed limit and are more predictable than human driven vehicles.

 

[Lumpy1106]

Bumping this thread because I just learned that the company I work for is doing studies on full-sized automated buses in 10 different cities in the US. It immediately got me wondering if Disney had thought about driverless buses - it seems like the perfect test case. After all, at WDW there are a set number of places you want to go, and the only thing that limits how quickly you can get there by bus is the frequency of the buses. What if WDW ran a fleet of smaller, 8-10 passenger driverless buses that would take you between the resorts and the parks on demand? Sortof like the Minnie Vans without the driver;
Driverless Bus Blog
As an aside, there is a bus route that goes by my house that we call the "empty bus". There's never anyone in it largely because it only goes that way to turn around, but that's led us to joke that they should replace the bus with a Prius if its just going to drive around empty. That's sort-of a big problem with buses though; most of the time the capacity far exceeds the demand but you do have to keep them on the road to satisfy what demand you do have. With a small, driverless bus you could park the thing whenever the demand drops and put it back into service just as quickly. It would never have to drive around empty.

 

[OKW Lover]

Since the thread is ~2.5 years old, I'm going to say that Disney never moved forward with this test since they do not have driverless bus services for CM's.

 

[gatour]

Our local transportation is looking at driver less buses. They are planning on converting an existing overhead people mover type track (that crosses a river) and where the lines currently end have it go down to ground level and use dedicated lanes.

I think this would be a first step. For truly safe self driving cars, I think it will take a majority of the cars to be networked together, so each car doesn't need to make a guess about how to react to an unusual situation. One car can tell another car I am going to do an evasive action and heading this way. The other car would do the "opposite"

 

[tlg588]

Are the monorails driverless?

 

[Searc]

Are the monorails driverless?

No.

 

[jimmymc]

Are the monorails driverless?

Sort of? They are automated but still have a driver who can take control.

 

[OKW Lover]

Sort of? They are automated but still have a driver who can take control.

Actually, the driver is in control of the Monorail.

 

[jimmymc]

Actually, the driver is in control of the Monorail.

I thought they changed a few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_System#Automation