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Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

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Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#251

Post by cjrp »

rogerbinns wrote: post #154
arrrg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m interested in is whether they counted hypothetical accidents. As far as I know, there always has to be someone in the driver’s seat, ready to step in at any time. How often did that person have to step in? Now that would be an interesting metric, especially when plotted over time. As is, it should be pretty unlikely for the autonomous cars to cause accidents, even if they were much less reliable than human d…

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.

Actually, it kind of is available for planes (at least the autopilot systems). See the AF447 accident and how the autopilot disconnected itself when it started getting conflicting data from the pitot.

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#252

Post by [deleted] »

duaneb wrote: post #196
mike-cardwell wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not factoring in the Media, which will raise a big fuss about taking away their rights and robots not being safe... you get the idea. I can't imagine how people will react once there's an actual possibility a car could be driving on the road with no human controlling it.

[deleted]

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#253

Post by flyinRyan »

powerslave12r wrote: post #143
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #67

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.

What? No way, trains/metro are an awful system that needs to be displaced by robot cars as soon as possible. A train is a large vehicle taking a lot of people to somewhere that no one wants to go. A robot car can pick me up at my door and drop me off at the front door of my job. It would only need to drive when there are people who want to go somewhere instead of "every 15 minutes regardless of how few people use it".

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#254

Post by darkxanthos »

modernshoggoth wrote: post #197
VBprogrammer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Google have simply done a better job of creating a self-driving car than you are willing to let yourself believe. 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…

Indeed. The whole self-driven car isn't a new idea - various individuals and university disciplines have been trying the idea for the last decade over in Europe - it's legal to test these ideas on the road in some countries over there. If you make the assumption that all cars will be AI, then traffic-handling becomes very, very simple. It's not obstacles or accidents that cause serious problems for traffic, it's the…

The idea of all cars following the same set of rules even if they are all AI driven is actually way too complicated. Bugs and misunderstandings of the standard would cause deviations that the other cars would need to react to anyway.

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#255

Post by flyinRyan »

paganel wrote: post #59
andrewljohnson wrote: post #25

Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone. When economists think about technology, they look at it as a productivity booster. From that angle, robot cars will have a huge impact - so many commute hours will be transformed to work, or even leisure, which also boosts productivity. So many smart people are about to be given a 10% or better…

> Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone. I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah, it might prove to be a very good thing for the United States, but for the rest of world there's first Europe's public transport networks (I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe, I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you), and short of us reaching the Si…

Either you have the perfect commute (rent must be expensive?) or you're just not paying attention to how much time you're using in travel. Public transport takes longer than driving in virtually every possible situation. The only equalizer is if your commute were near perfect, and short you might gain a slight advantage since the driver has to park.

But if we go to robot cars we no longer have to park.

Also, places like Cairo are bad because of the human drivers. If you only allow robot cars that all goes away. The system can know where everyone is and where they are going and adjust speeds to the point of having your car end up 20cm behind the next car instead of having to use the breaks if you went 1/kmph faster for the last 200km.

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#256

Post by nandemo »

alwaysinshade wrote: post #224
w1ntermute wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don't see any of these cars driving in the crazy traffic of Cairo, Istanbul, or any other metropolis from the rest of Asia or Africa. You're wrong. Japan is also planning on introducing self-driving cars shortly.

I think the parent poster meant cities where the road rules amount to a functioning car horn. The roads of Japan are nothing like Cairo/Istanbul etc. There are a lot of cars - but they drive in an orderly, predictable manner. On a related note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurikamome In Tokyo they already have an automated transit system that is basically a truck on rails. See this image to get a better picture: http…

Yurikamome is just a driverless train.

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#257

Post by Retric »

danweber wrote: post #136
fl3tch wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those accidents happen in rain and snow, which the Google folks admit are not as well tested. Under clear conditions on open roads, humans probably do better than 300K miles too.

That doesn't seem right to me. A person driving 10K a year will hit 300,000 miles over the course of 30 years. Does the average person really have less than 1 accident every 30 years? Especially when they are younger?

I think it includes truckers who are far safer than normal drivers on average and do a lot of driving.

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#258

Post by charlieok »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #185
saraid216 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense). And taxes. Google isn't being funded by our dollars, except through a series of indirections.

I wonder if they get a tax credit for this kind of research? Seems possible, and certain kinds of tax credit may as well be subsidies. All speculation on my part, though. I wonder if anyone knows?

A tax credit for a research project which until very recently was known only to a small group of people in Google's super-secret "project X" labs?

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#259

Post by mmanfrin »

joshlegs wrote: post #94
mmanfrin wrote: post #11

I'd love to live in a world where roads were full of auto-driving electric cars that automatically went to recharge and were replaced by fleet cars, and stopped at various points for people to load up. Like personal, on demand busses.

> Like personal, on demand buses That use a heck of a lot more gas ;)

Hence my use of the word 'electric' :]

Re: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

#260

Post by waterlesscloud »

charlieok wrote: post #258
waterlesscloud wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they get a tax credit for this kind of research? Seems possible, and certain kinds of tax credit may as well be subsidies. All speculation on my part, though. I wonder if anyone knows?

A tax credit for a research project which until very recently was known only to a small group of people in Google's super-secret "project X" labs?

So secret it sprang from the government-funded and highly-publicized DARPA challenge?
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