171–180 of 269 posts
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http://trafficwaves.org/
I too live in the Seattle area, and I've heard of this technique. Sadly, when implementing it, all you see is the angry drivers behind you who rush to pass and gobble up the traffic bubble you've been saving.
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Computer driven cars also have the option of just stopping when things aren't looking good (analogous to a panic). For all we know they could stop when a leaf blows across the road - unlikely to cause an accident because of the reaction time. The "just stop" approach isn't available for planes or nuclear power plants for example.
The "just stop" approach is also problematic on a busy highway.
The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team! Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads…
I think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given it's not personal transport.
Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most efficient transport system.
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Would you be ok with a computer that augments your own driving (similar to those cars that automatically brake when they sense an accident)? If so, then it's just a matter of continuously improving on this augmentation. Even if it never reaches the level where you can truly step away from the wheel while the computer drives 100 miles in rush hour traffic, attaching an AI to help avoid accidents in many common situati…
We are being promised a self-driving car. Either it drives itself, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's not what it claims. And if it does, what are the driving aids for?! That's like wearing a hat indoors.
The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team! Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads…
I think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given it's not personal transport.
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In theory autonomous care would be able to include a number of other factor to decide if they are on the road or not. Including, GPS, wifi signals, the grade of the road, the texture of the road, etc.
What about situations where lanes have been plowed off-center? Even the most accurate GPS and accelerometers aren't going to help the vehicle understand that the appropriate path has been shifted.
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Most people stay way too close to the car in front, though. You're doing well as long as nothing unexpected happens. But if someone for some reason has to hit the brake really fast, you'll get a completely unnecessary pileup. The Google cars probably also have additional margins of safety to allow for the driver to react to unexpected computer behavior _and_ actually step in and perform the maneuver himself.
> Most people stay way too close to the car in front, though. Yes, and people who don't care about this risk are very annoying drivers for the people who do.
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I imagine, once automated cars are safe and popular enough, they will mandate that all new cars must have it and set a date after which only automated cars are allowed on the road. It will become an offence to take over and drive manually unless the circumstance demands it. You'll be fine driving your Aston Martin, but your kids, or their kids might not be.
I don't buy it. In that scenario, how does anybody learn to drive in the first place? Someone who hasn't spent years of their life driving manually won't have developed the skills to intervene properly in an emergency. At best, driving would, become a specialty career/hobby, like piloting aircraft. By the time all personal transportation is automatic, it won't just be the status quo with "robot chauffeurs". The whole…
I think horse riding might be the best example of the way things will go if and when automatically driven cars become a reality. Once a life skill required by everyone, now a hobby in all but the most extreme of communities.
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I think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given it's not personal transport.
Actually, not when you factor in the need to serve unpopular routes and non-Busyntimes. That's a lot of trains and buses running nearly empty. Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most efficient transport system.
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Agree. Did humans step-in when they noted conditions which they believed the car unable to handle and perhaps prevent the majority of likely accidents?
My suspicion is that the figures quoted around these Google cars and their safety record, if you take them at face value, lead to a ludicrous level of optimism.
They have done this by attacking the problem from the 'Big Data' mindset which Google are intimately familiar with. Instead of trying to crack hard AI problems (computer vision being the most obvious) they are simply counting on being able to record and use enough information both before and during the actual driving that they simply avoid these problems.
From what I have seen this approach seems to be working. My real concern is it will not be economically viable to integrate the kind of sensor arrays they are depending on into a real car (2 radars and the laser scanner being the killers).