I would love to see these in a city like SF. It's a small city (geographically), but we spend $1B/year on MUNI, which carries about 700K passengers/day. Put together a fleet of, say, 5000 such autonomous vehicles that take you door to door, for the price of a MUNI ticket. Wow. That would be something.
How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
61–70 of 130 posts
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not the AI (driving is relatively simple), but the sensors. Cameras are bad vs. our eyes.
Artificial Intelligence is a broad category -- it's not just the driving decisions to be made but also the particle filtering, car localization, policy search, object tracking, kalman filter, etc etc. The fact that the car can intelligently drive around bikers on the side of the road (and wait for an appropriate time to do so) is a significant AI challenge if it's actually broken down. It involves everything from raw…
I wouldn't rate particle filtering, localization, object tracking and filtering in AI. They are enablers, but not the intelligence.
Policy search is AI. =)
Eyes not only have great resolution and depth perception, but are attached to an amazing pattern processing machine that looks forward in time to estimate the next set of perceptions. They're also very environment-invariant - sun, snow, heavy rain, fog, etc would screw a camera, but human eyes can handle it relatively gracefully.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don''t know. It is my impression that traditional companies are not able to produce complex software. I guess there are many paradigms that you have to break to become a software company. It seems to me that is the reason why cell phone companies ended up buying their O.S. from google.
> It is my impression that traditional companies are not able to produce complex software. What gave you that impression? What do you define as a non-traditional company?
I think what he means is that car companies are good at making cars, but they're not as good at making the kind of AI you need for a fully autonomous car.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see what Google's role is going to be, aside from pushing forward legislation for unknown reasons. The auto manufacturers don't need them for the technology and research... they've all had access to that for just as long. We'd have self-driving cars today if the public (and regulators) were ready for it. But they're not and aren't going to be overnight; what makes more sense is to gradually introduce the feat…
I don''t know. It is my impression that traditional companies are not able to produce complex software. I guess there are many paradigms that you have to break to become a software company. It seems to me that is the reason why cell phone companies ended up buying their O.S. from google.
Spend some time studying what current auto engines are, and how much software they embody. I'm not sure how much of it has been developed by the auto companies themselves, but there's quite a lot of it, and it's pretty robust: how ofter has your car OS crashed lately?
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes sense for the self-driving car to yield to pedestrians all the time. So if you see that there is no driver, you assume it will stop until you are out of its way. There will be no more awkward social guessing games!
There is a second part on it. How will cars behave when they are driving along a crowded street in a place where people crosses anywhere and changing directions and intentions very fast. I don't think there will be dangers to pedestrian. But it's going to be a tought problem avoiding false emergency breaking. Once more you have to rely on visual contact to know what are the real intentions of people. Crossing, waitin…
Like any other technology, people will grab the wheel when the incentives don't pay off. Take for example the iPad. iPad is great as a media consumption device, or the occasional email. But as soon as I have to write longer than a few minutes, the iPad becomes a burden. In the case of a heavily crowded street a self-driving automobile might be able to trek through, but it may be more feasible to grab the wheel if you just want to move on.
Once self-driving cars become more commonplace, issues with eye-contact with pedestrians will naturally seek their own level as comfort ensues.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#66Everything Google does feeds back, somehow, to data mining. How does self-driving cars fit in to Google's plans? ETA: Downvoted for asking a serious question? WTH?
Constantly updated Street view. Also, they could map all the roads of the world this way.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#67I wonder if they will eventually license the self-driving software in an Android-like model?
Doubtful. Most of these companies want to own the tech. I'm actually concerned they won't be able to sell it if they tried - Chrysler is actively developing a self-driving system that they hope to deploy in 2 years.
Really? I'm no expert, but this seems like a market where it'd be natural for there to be only a few major players, rather than every manufacturer having their proprietary implementations. Why would you build an in-house system rather than buy one? Generally because buying is more expensive in the long run, because you can build a better one, or because keeping the expertise in-house allows for more chances of integration.
The expense idea makes no sense. This is software we're talking about, so the marginal cost is always going to be 0. It's also software that's likely going to have to through very expensive certification procedures to be allowed on the roads (or to be allowed by insurance companies). How could it possibly be economical for a manufacturer with 2% market share to do this on their own?
So could a smallish manufacturer at least build a better one, if not cheaper? It's hard to see why you'd expect that. Maybe if 20 of them tried, a couple of them would end up with a better technology than what could be bought. But even if that's true, it's not going to brighten the day of the remaining 18 manufacturers who ended up with substandard software. There's one obvious exception (regional differences - maybe Japanese drivers have very different preferences from German ones, or something).
Are there any integration benefits from making the software for self driving cars in-house? I can't think of any, but I'm not too familiar with the automotive industry. Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.
Of course there's no guarantee that even if the future ends up as one of a few major in-house systems and a couple of successful publicly available ones, Google's solution would be one of the successful ones. Still seems like it's worth a shot.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what about reflective objects? The roadway is covered with different degrees of weirdly-reflective surfaces. Surely those beams land in places where they shouldn't (on the mirrors), and surely the car doesn't stop every time.
LIDAR works _through_ reflections. It essentially paints out the surrounding area with laser pulses and then measures the time for those pulses to come back. Since lasers travel at the speed of light, this time-to-return is quite small and hence they need quite accurate clocks (which is where a lot of the expense comes in). That being said, laser range-finding works well on diffuse surfaces; this is because when diff…
What about a fence - the wires reflect the light but they make up perhaps 5% of the crossection - the LIDAR could "see" only the holes
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
But people aren't very good at driving, it would be silly to try and handicap computers with the features we evolved. Every new car made already has lots of advanced technology to make up for our two eyes.
Agreed, I don't think we should strive for parity. I'd much rather see driverless cars that are better than humans at driving, even if they need more tools to do it. The more poor drivers we can replace with driverless cars, the better.
Commercial self-driving cars should use every sensor modality which is cost effective and which improves safety. I would never argue we should hamstring our driverless cars, let's give them the best shot to be uber-safe and reliable, no question.
In the mean time, on a completely non-commercial separate track, AI researchers should try to do more with less. Driving using only visible-light sensors is a challenge. AI is pushed forward by taking on challenges exactly like this, let's see the push continue.
These two tracks may in fact intersect. When your LIDAR and radar are caked with ice and mud, you'll want the car to be able to drive visually at least to a safe stopping point.
Re: How Google's Self-Driving Car Works
#70Everything Google does feeds back, somehow, to data mining. How does self-driving cars fit in to Google's plans? ETA: Downvoted for asking a serious question? WTH?
I dont work for Google, so I dont know. I'd imagine some projects aren't all about the strategic long term "money plan," rather that strategic long term "people plan." This is a cool project, and Google might just want to give talented people an outlet for their creativity. They work on this fun-project (and are having a good time so they don't want to leave Google), and they also work on another project that actually brings in money. Moreover, a project like signals prestige to outsiders (which attracts more talented people). Plain and simple