Self-declared self-driving cars

rafer :

I was watching traffic this morning and realized that beacons matter. As part of authorizing self driving cars, governments need to require them to send out a heartbeat in an open protocol for other cars (self-driving and not), smartphones, et al , to be able to identify their nature.

It’s important for safety and for the later creation of flocking behavior when there are enough self-drivers out there. Hopefully Google’s already prepping a spec to release for other manufacturers to adopt.

Boating already has a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System) that does this well:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System  And it looks like the FAA is trying to move air travel in this direction as well.

Completely agreed that we need to build broadcast functionality into not only cars, but all vehicles and autonomous drones — land, sea, air, underground, and space.