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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

#71

Post by weavie »

privong wrote: post #32
pxlpshr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al. From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have the…

> Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. 1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

Impairment is on a continuous scale. Even a totally sober person would have their concentration slightly impaired if say they caught something out of the ordinary in the corner of their eye. If that happens at the wrong time, you have an accident.

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

#72

Post by skrause »

logikblok wrote: post #64

Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will: 1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?

No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.

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

#73

Post by josephlord »

Zigurd wrote: post #23
dabeeeenster wrote: post #15

As a city cyclist, the Google solution looks way safer than the current status quo...

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop.

Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).

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

#74

Post by cliveowen »

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)

Exactly, I live in Rome and you'd really be surprised by the number of bikers who drive on the sidewalk to avoid morning traffic. I don't think Google cars are prepared to respond to people merging from the sidewalk, they're just unpredictable and nothing will ever change that.

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

#75

Post by mortenjorck »

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…

I see where your concern is: this is the sort of lateral synthesis of ideas that computers are still vastly our lessers at performing. We can fill in what we know is going to happen before the rider hits the ground and potentially react before the event happens, while the computer would have to have an algorithm in place specifically to detect a combination of rider posture, angular acceleration of the bike, identify a heavy package affecting the center of balance, and so on.

Ideally the system can compensate in another area where it does beat us, such as reaction time.

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

#76

Post by jws »

privong wrote: post #32
pxlpshr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al. From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have the…

> Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. 1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

The CDC says alcohol impairment is a factor in 31% of traffic fatalities.

On Friday and Saturday nights (presumably peak impairment time), checkpoints determine that about 3% of drivers are impaired. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/48/10/1

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

#77

Post by Zigurd »

josephlord wrote: post #73
Zigurd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop. Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cycl…

Autonomous braking exists for those kinds of events: When a person steps out in front of a car, for example. Yet I don't see people deliberately jumping out in front of cars just to mess with them.

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

#78

Post by seren »

maxerickson wrote: post #69
seren wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real markets are long haul trucking and small delivery van for the last miles. All in all it is probably a significant portions of job.

There are several million truckers in the U.S., so it's somewhere around 1% (but it's probably less than 2%). I guess there are probably lots of delivery drivers, but those vehicles will still need tenders (at least until robots can do the last 100 feet of the delivery).

The "issue" is probably not for the general workforce, but it will significantly reduce the number of not-so-qualified jobs. According to a quick googling "1 in 15 worker in a long truck driver according to the ATA" [1]. But this is expected that automation tend to reduce these kind of jobs first.

[1] http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-th...

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

#79

Post by venus »

privong wrote: post #32
pxlpshr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al. From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have the…

> Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. 1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

It's not just high, it's ludicrously high. Over the easter weekend in my city, extensive random breath testing of almost 60,000 people caught 58 driving above 0.05 - still too high but orders of magnitude less than the GP's assertion.

One in 10^4 would be (much) more accurate.

Source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/nsw-poli...

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

#80

Post by dalke »

privong wrote: post #32
pxlpshr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al. From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have the…

> Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. 1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

I too, as "statistically significant amount" to me means "measurable above detector error."

FWIW, http://www.allergy.org.au/patients/product-allergy/alcohol-a... says:

> The human body constantly produces small amounts of alcohol itself. Normal levels of 0.01 to 0.03 mg of alcohol/100 ml are contained in the blood. By contrast, a blood alcohol limit for driving of 0.05 per cent is equal to around 50 mg of alcohol/100 ml of blood.

Thus, according to my definition, 100% of drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system, though nowhere near to the level of impairment.

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