Robocones

Anonymous Meoward writes "Researchers at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln have come up with robotic traffic barrels ('bollards', for our British readers) that can be repositioned by remote control, thus minimizing a road worker's time in harm's way. Apparently, the barrels can be grouped and positioned by an autonomous 'shepherd' unit, that is also smart enough to also remove an errant barrel from its herd. The barrels themselves are about as intelligent as.. well, orange barrels. Okay, let's cue the more obvious jokes..." Reader zombieflesheater submitted this previous attempt to mobilize road furniture.

Original Article

[moon_monkey]

The original article can be found here [newscientist.com].

International English

[Anonymous Coward]

('bollards', for our British readers)

"British" = International.

American English is only (officially) spoken in the USA. British English is what's spoken in Britain + what's taught everywhere else in the world to us non-native English speakers.

Re:Practical or somebody's thesis?

[Re-Pawn]

From the CDC (1998):
Among the 492 work zone fatalities, the leading occupations were construction laborer (42%), truck driver (9%), construction trades supervisor (8%), and operating engineer (8%). The most common primary sources of injury were trucks (45%), road grading and surfacing machinery (15%), and cars (15%). Seventy-four percent of the work zone fatality victims were employed privately, the remainder by state or local governments (13% each). In 318 of the 465 vehicle and equipment-related fatalities within work zones, a worker on foot was struck by a vehicle. Victims of these events were as likely to be struck by a construction vehicle (154 fatalities) as by a passing traffic vehicle (152 fatalities). Incidents involving backing vehicles were prominent among the 154 worker-on-foot fatalities that occurred within the confines of the work zone (51%).

Definitely not an epidemic, though it appears that the workers themselves cause about half of the accidents.

Re:What about the physical characteristic changes?

[leperkuhn]

The barrels are usually filled with water and can mess your car up if you drive into one or a dozen.

Re:What about the physical characteristic changes?

[drinkypoo]

The robotics portion of this device is in the very bottom of the cone and probably weighs about the same as a radio-controlled car (since that is basically what these things are, big ugly orange computer-controlled RC cars.) It's probably significantly less weight than the rest of the "bollard". (I wonder wtf the etymology of that is, if it's similar to botts' dots...)

Er anyway the point is that the only way it will make the thing more dangerous is if you hit it hard enough to send it flying and the base of it strikes something. This is somewhat likely since the base will probably be the heaviest part of the whole thing, but you could pad it up or something and remove the majority of the risk there.

I was at UNL a few years ago

[bmajik]

and they were talking about doing this. A few different faculty were working on it.

It was _not_ some kids thesis.

I had the same reaction everyone here is having. "Who's going to buy a multi-thousand dollar traffic barrel ?"

And the answer is..

Somebody thats had to pay even _one_ workmans comp/disability suit because one of their crew got creamed by a car or truck at highway speeds.

If you think about it, its a very unglamorous meat-space problem, but solving it with technology means working on some pretty slick stuff...

which is sort of what the UNL CS/CSeng dept was like :)