181–190 of 216 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let us all pray that it doesn't agree with you.
I Have No Pedal and I Must Brake
Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
This especially scares me as a cyclist. I'm sure they'll put a lot of effort into preventing automated cars from hitting other vehicles or slow-moving pedestrians. Now what about bicycles traveling around 20 mph in the right-hand side of the lane? Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't ha…
Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
This especially scares me as a cyclist. I'm sure they'll put a lot of effort into preventing automated cars from hitting other vehicles or slow-moving pedestrians. Now what about bicycles traveling around 20 mph in the right-hand side of the lane? Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't ha…
What worries more is the bicycles travelling around 10mph or less, in the bike lane, on the wrong side of the road. The number of times I've seen this since coming to America made me seriously wonder if the road traffic laws were that different here.
It's almost as bad as bicycles on the pavement, but at least people cycling on the wrong side of the road are somewhat predictable, whereas pavement bikers could do anything at any time. Grr!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg (volvo crash avoidance failure)
to shake people's confidence in these systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an avid cyclist. I think I'd prefer a deterministic, law abiding driver to the average human. What makes me feel unsafe are the drivers who break the law (you don't know who you are) and the drivers who hate cyclists and pass us as closely as possible, throw bottles at us, etc (you do know who you are). What makes me feel unsafe is the unpredictability. I would expect a computer would just follow the rules exactl…
Where do you live that drivers through bottles at cyclists, and how common is this?
Have they tested it in the snow?
Have they tested it driving on ice?
Does it know when its fuel gets low?
Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?
Have they driven it on the highway?
Have they driven it on the countryside?
How does it treat cyclists?
How does it treat pedestrians?
How does it treat deer, squirrels, birds and other fauna on the road?
How does it respond to aggressive drivers?
Can it park?
Can it parallel park?
Does it know not to block the box?
Does it know what to do when a traffic light is out?
Does it know to pull over when emergency vehicles need to pass by?
Does it know how to merge?
Does it know how to avoid hanging out in other cars' blind spots?
Does it know that eighteen-wheelers have large blind spots ("If you can't see me, I can't see you")?
Does it know what to do when four cars come to a four-way stop intersection simultaneously? (Does anyone?)
Can it find parking?
Can it pick a parking spot that's far enough away from driveways and fire hydrants?
How much of the logic is dependent on the car it's installed for?
How much work is involved in installing it to a new car?
What does it do if it gets boxed in by FBI agents on the highway?
What does it do if debris knocks out the camera?
What does it do the if car in front of it starts fish-tailing on ice?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving. Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. Even if you have near perfect data about where the other cars are there's always uncertainty about other objects on the road: tree branches, deer, a child running after…
Pedestrian collision avoidance technology is already available in the Volvo S60.
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> They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. Yes they do. You could perhaps argue they do so less .
OK, kernel panics aside. Unless they're using a random number generator seeded with outside data, all computer operation can be called deterministic and 100% predictable. Because it's 100% repeatable given identical preconditions. People? Not so / not currently doable. If the wrong operation for a situation were performed, it'd be due to a higher-level decision going wrong, not the command. Meanwhile, people can "hit…
I work on autonomous driving robots. Teams I have been on in the past won extremely competitive autonomous vehicle competitions. Our robots crashed all the time. ALL THE TIME!
There is nothing deterministic about how autonomous systems work. In fact our algorithms were by definition random number generators! We randomly generated "hypotheses" and then had heuristic tests that figured out which was the most likely trail and then chose it. It worked well, 99% of the time. But that 1% was a killer.
Mind you, since we were winning we were doing better than the other solutions which tried to be more deterministic and use maps or things like that. We were basically stateless which reduces some of the feedback associated with getting messed up in some of your estimations.
The problem is all at the low level, not the high level.
Give a robot a perfect map and it is easy to find a way around safely. The problem comes determining what the hell the camera is seeing (lasers are a lot easier, but not as flexible and more expensive). That is why the bulk of the effort is focused on computer vision not path finding, path finding algorithms are simple.
Sure actuating the pedals is fairly trivial, but to call autonomous systems "deterministic" is scary to someone who knows how fickle they are. I'm a huge advocate of self-driving cars, but we are not there yet, and when we get there we need to do a pile of peer review on the code (which better be open source). You never know what race conditions will blow it all up.
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Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project. It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind of corporate strategy.
Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google dominates - they are unpredictable and creative. Crazy stuff Google did: * mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers * Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law * launched a satellite * deep tendrils of fiber optics and com…
Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
unfortunately, I think a lot of Americans are already doing this, or something close to it, today -- but without an AI driving the car. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen women driving huge SUV's with kids in the back, and the woman is yapping on a cellphone while checking her makeup in the mirror, etc. Oh and, while driving.