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Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

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Re: Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

#2
This is part of the general trend in robots summed up roughly like: 1. Corporations want to save money and are willing to spend up front for it. People will replace personal vehicles far more slowly. 2. A restricted environment is way easier to engineer a robot for vs. arbitrary environments. 3. It is easier to train workers about working around heavy machinery than to teach arbitrary humans to look both ways before crossing the street. 4. It is way easier to get permission on privately owned land than to convince the government for a state or nation wide laws.

I work in autonomous drones and see similar trends in that space too.

Re: Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

#5
Is there a non-"team green" solution that works well? With all the bad press about Deere these days (including a few HN comments from suppliers to Deere that revealed they deliberately ask for slightly tweaked parts to avoid being compatible with regular parts), I wonder if there's a suitable alternative.

Re: Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

#6
But an automated tractor is not going to stop for a mother bird protecting her eggs.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vU-BuWY7wjw

https://v.redd.it/netuqk4d5qn81/DASH_720.mp4

I actually feel that is a real problem and shows the little things developers don't take into account and why self-driving cars are going to kill a bunch of people until they debug it, with you as the beta-tester.

Re: Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

#8

Totally different set of problems. An autonomous tractor is more like a big CNC machine. Positioning is easy and very little intelligence is required.

Having driven a tractor on my parents' farm, I can confirm this. It is so mindless it is not boring, because you can think of other things.

Re: Tired of waiting for driverless vehicles? Head to a farm

#10
post #6

But an automated tractor is not going to stop for a mother bird protecting her eggs. https://www.youtube.com/embed/vU-BuWY7wjw https://v.redd.it/netuqk4d5qn81/DASH_720.mp4 I actually feel that is a real problem and shows the little things developers don't take into account and why self-driving cars are going to kill a bunch of people until they debug it, with you as the beta-tester.

Self driving tractors and self driving cars have much different safety features. Don't get me wrong, tractors should absolutely be smart enough to handle wildlife like that. But comparing the two is unfair.
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