Evgeni Magid shared his opinion on perspectives of unmanned ground vehicles.
The topic of unmanned ground vehicles is not a new subject since this idea has been implemented in the real life by a number of major companies, technology universities or individual researchers. An alliance of engineers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National University of Singapore will present their invention, an autonomous golf car, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), taking place in Germany in the end of September-beginning of October. The car has already been tested in Singapore: it transported approximately 500 tourists along the golf course. During 6 trial days 98% of passengers claimed this vehicle to be completely trustworthy, reliable and absolutely safe.
Security has become the key issue of the program: “Elon Musk, the co-founder and the CEO of Tesla Motors, has recently stated that, man-operated cars will eventually be outlawed in favor of those controlled by robots. He believes that autonomous cars will drive better and be something like an elevator. In addition, Mr. Musk mentioned that once we used to have elevator operators. Then a simple scheme enabling elevators to stop automatically at the requested floor was invented. Now there are about 2 billion cars. According to the American inventor, moving everything to the autonomous vehicles will take 20 years”, - said Nargiz Asadova, the program host, before giving the floor to Evgeni Magid, the Head of Intelligent Robotics Systems Lab (LIRS) of Innopolis University, and asking him to share his view on the current issues in the field of unmanned transportation means.
“We face two types of problematic issues related to unmanned vehicles. The first one concerns technology and thus has to be dealt by engineers and programmers. Then it comes to the legal issue in terms of security”, - said Evgeni Magid. He explained that legal issues are often related to the question of responsibility for a human life in case of a car-induced incident and admitted that legal boundaries actually impede introduction of the ready-made solutions to the real life.
Later on, Head of the Laboratory of the Russian IT University talked about the operating principles of the autonomous golf car and noted that he knows one of its creators in person: “Yes, I know Marcelo Anga from Singapore quite well. He has a very warm attitude towards Russia. Marcelo is going to present the vehicle to his colleagues and to the public at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems that will take place in Hamburg in early October”.
Evgeni Magid has also mentioned that Innopolis University is interested in creation of a small autonomous car: “Clearly, we do not have enough financial and human resources to compete with the Google car. Thus, we have decided to launch the development of new cars similar to those mentioned in Marcelo’s research. A golf course is located very close to the university so I suppose that after my visit to Germany and talks with Marcelo we will start working in this direction”.
Marcelo H. Ang Jr. and Evgeni Magid, IROS-2015 at Hamburg
