Automated vehicles vs. autonomous vehicles
Among the various questions raised by the advance of automated vehicle technology, odds are that most people would rank questions of terminology on the less fascinating end of the spectrum. But to talk about the tech, we have to call it something, so there’s no way around at least a quick discussion on terms.
Two popular options are automated and autonomous. For roboticists, a robot is autonomous if it uses its own artificial intelligence to make decisions about what actions to take. This fits nicely with the etymological roots of the word: an autonomous robot rules itself. A robot with less autonomy doesn’t make all of its own decisions: instead, it relies on the human operator working the controls. (At this point, we could digress into an inquiry on the nature of robot free will — questioning whether a robot can truly rule itself, as its actions are ultimately determined by explicit programming, or by the algorithms it helped construct through machine learning — but we don’t need to go that deep here.)
The trouble with autonomous is that, along the way, it has also acquired a more particular meaning in the automotive field. (That is, in the field of “automobiles”, which, etymologically speaking, are “self-moving”, whether or not they are actually driving themselves, or being driven by humans. No shortage of opportunities here for parenthetical asides on linguistic jumbles.) In the ’90s, while working on adaptive cruise control systems, which automatically adjust a vehicle’s speed to safely follow a leading vehicle, tech developers started distinguishing different types of adaptive cruise control as autonomous or cooperative. Autonomous adaptive cruise control systems perceive the environment by using sensors on board the vehicle, while cooperative adaptive cruise control systems collect additional data by also communicating wirelessly with other vehicles. Here, the key sense is that an autonomous system is independent, self-contained: rather than talking to other vehicles, it simply uses its own sensors.
So, sometimes an autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that makes its own decisions, rather than being controlled by a human; and sometimes, it’s a vehicle that exclusively uses its own on-board sensors, rather than also communicating with other vehicles.
A tidy way to avoid that ambiguity is to avoid the word autonomous. An automated vehicle makes its own decisions about how to act, whether or not it communicates with other vehicles. A connected vehicle uses vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology to communicate with other vehicles, or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology to communicate with stoplights or the like, or vehicle-to-anything (V2X) technology to communicate with other equipped entities, whether or not it makes its own decisions. An automated vehicle may be connected or not connected; a connected vehicle may be automated or not automated.
Automated has a growing following, including heavy hitters like the Society of Automotive Engineers, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Automated Vehicles Symposium. Admittedly, though, autonomous is still commonplace, and will probably remain so for a while yet. That is, unless another of the panoply of contenders triumphs — self-driving, driverless, robocar…