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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#41

Post by deanclatworthy »

arikrak wrote: post #20
deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that k…

Humans have very poor peripheral vision, while the self-driving car can see perfectly in all directions. I think it also has a faster reaction time. (Though either way, a car may not always be able to break in time.)

But what about distance? Imagine a cyclist travelling down a hill at 50km/h and running straight over some crossroads in a residential neighbourhood. Assuming a line of sight to the hill, a human can probably recognise that that fast moving object (that may or may not run over the cross-roads) is a bicycle with a cyclist on it quicker than a computer can do the same.

This of course, assumes the driver has good vision or is wearing any prescription they might be required to do so by law.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#42

Post by deanclatworthy »

oflordal wrote: post #37
deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that k…

>What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road My Volvo already has a system that is better at that than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nfT9dfPi7g

Very impressive, although I'd like to throw a few more edge cases at the system than the one shown in the demo video.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#43

Post by pazra »

1stop wrote: post #40
pazra wrote: post #19

Given that the NSA will likely have a backdoor into any automated driving system, is this really a technology you'd like to see become all pervasive? "We don't like this guy's ideology - ok, let's arrange for him to have an 'accident'".

They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...

That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#44

Post by bertil »

nabla9 wrote: post #18
deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that k…

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Google cars still can't drive in the rain or in the snow. Not even on a wet street. They have driven all those thousand miles in Mountain View, Calif. in good weather. Generally lidar's don't work well with rain or reflective surfaces.

Indeed — I remember a projet in high-school, explaining how lidar were being used to measuring rain drops direction…

The thing is: there apparently now is a technology (at Mercedes or BMW) that uses beamers instead of front lights; a secondary camera detects droplets’ movement, predicts their fall and the beamer doesn’t shine light precisely on them. It helps light in front of you at night without shining mainly the rain. I was stunned when I learned we are now that fast. Same thing with cooking mosquitoes with lasers. I’m assuming that with those tech handy, a lidar should work properly through the rain. It leaves braking as a problem, especially on black ice — and that one is tougher.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#45

Post by melling »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over 30,0000 deaths in the US alone every year, which is actually near historical lows. I believe there are several million accidents and hundreds of thousands of injuries. Now the computer might not be perfect but if it's 10x better, wouldn't that be acceptable?

Getting to that point is the challenge. I'm just throwing out questions and raising the point that there are some very very hard challenges to solve, where humans are probably much better.

You should try to be more specific. What are the hard challenges that remain? Where are humans better? If it's bad weather driving, for example, perhaps humans would drive in those instances.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#46

Post by barrkel »

bertil wrote: post #27
antr wrote: post #3

I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.

As a cyclist, I was shocked to see the cyclist change his mind like that —unless he was a tester too, that’s how you get bumped– but I really hope Google Cars learn that most cyclists actually don’t signal their turn that well. Cars don’t bother either, and the last frame show how most non-car drivers get killed: don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang. Seeing how Google taught its car t…

don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang

Can you rephrase this? I can't understand it.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#47

Post by icebraining »

bitJericho wrote: post #38
arikrak wrote: post #10

It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...

There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.

A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#48

Post by skrause »

rwmj wrote: post #5

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

I think self-driving cars will be introduced very gradually. First only highways where it's really easy for a computer, then maybe American cities. The harder the street layout, the longer we'll have to wait for this technology. So maybe American cities will get the technology a few years before European.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#49

Post by bertil »

0x006A wrote: post #28

Looking forward to see how self-driving cars can handle traffic in a city like Mumbai or Cairo.

Indeed…

I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#50

Post by josephlord »

rwmj wrote: post #5

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

Southern Europe in particular, Sicily was good fun; I hear Naples is even more exciting.

The interesting thing was that the drivers were quite skilled but the way they drove and the traffic moves they had to be and even with those skills there were far more dented cars around than in the UK where systems and organisation allow a lower skill level.

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