The Transport, Interior and Education and Science ministries are together devising a proposal for legislative changes to accommodate driverless transport on Russian roads, Izvestia newspaper reported on Thursday, citing the head of the department of development programmes at the Transport Ministry, Alexei Semenov.
Legislative changes to facilitate the appearance of driverless transport on Russian roads are under discussion. Photo: Pixabay.com.
The official said that in formulating the proposal, cybersecurity was a priority issue. The threat of hackers or terrorists gaining remote control of driverless transport is considered one of the main technical challenges faced by the global automotive industry.
Preparations for the introduction of driverless transport were discussed on Wednesday at a roundtable at the State Duma attended by lawmakers, officials, technology developers, scientists and representatives of public organizations, Russian media reported.
Currently, only the use of automated transport where a driver is present to take over if necessary is being discussed, and the vehicle will have to bear markings clearly showing that it is automated, the Cnews technology news website reported. Vehicles will also have to be equipped with black box recorders and video recorders, the report said.
The Duma’s science and technology committee, which hosted the roundtable, established that changes would be needed to both criminal and administrative law, as well as to road traffic rules and technical regulations, Izvestia reported. Committee members agreed that a state commission for the licensing and certification of driverless transport would be needed, the report said.
The proposal is expected to be submitted to the Duma by the end of this year.
Russian carmakers including truckmaker Kamaz are working on driverless technology, along with several companies that are residents of the Skolkovo Foundation, such as KB Avrora and RoboCV.
While legislative changes have already been introduced in the U.S. and some European countries to facilitate the advent of driverless vehicles, in Russia such changes are still at the level of discussion, and experts have named the lack of legislative infrastructure as an obstacle to their introduction.
“If there's an accident, who will be to blame? That will be the biggest problem to solve before the cars can be introduced to cities,” Konstantin Trofimenko, director of the Centre for Research of Urban Transport Problems at the Higher School of Economics, a research university in Moscow, told Sk.ru in a recent interview.
At the roundtable devoted to the proposal, participants agreed that the driver present in the automated transport would be solely to blame, Cnews quoted Andrei Chernogorov, secretary of the Duma commission for the development of strategic IT systems, as saying.
Driverless transport, already in use in Russia in the form of robotised equipment at industrial sites such as plants and mines, will first be introduced more widely across closed territories, such as aerodromes, ports and farms, before hitting public roads, experts agree.
The Russian government has allocated funding for both air and land pilotless transport technology as part of the National Technological Initiative, a public-private partnership aimed at creating new technology markets through 2035 that President Vladimir Putin has named as a priority policy.