In the approach proposed here and implemented in VILMA01, a new actuator-based interface between driver and robot (dotted blue lines in Fig. 2) allows managing this cooperative planning and control.
That's because the driver is a robot — a robotic autonomous device — and it has not been programmed to complain.
The apparent goal was to replace its human drivers with robots in as short a time as possible, which Bloomberg says could be interpreted by some as "audacious, even reckless".
One reason for the company's backers to be asking more questions about its future profitability now is because labor costs are unlikely to do anything but rise in the short term — i.e. before it's able to replace all drivers with robots.
Its experience has been with human drivers, not robots.
"Uber is accelerating its plan to replace its 1 million human drivers with robots as quickly as possible," Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said in a blog post Thursday.
Uber, she reports, is looking to replace drivers with robots and notes, "Almost half of U.S. jobs are at high risk of computerization over the next 20 years".{xiv} What will humans do?
How should the robot driver respond?
But long before we're sitting in the passenger seat being ferried to our destination by a robot driver, a much bigger kind of vehicle is likely to be zooming past us, its speed and braking controlled not by a human but by a computer.
Today, Innovate UK, the government quango charged with overseeing the country's driverless plans, announced that our robot driver overlords will get their first crack at navigating the roads of Greenwich (in South East London), Bristol, and Coventry, in addition to Milton Keynes.
