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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

#291

Post by Joeri »

chillingeffect wrote: post #256
TheEzEzz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonom…

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses. Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario? First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times? Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.…

So, choose to have a dedicated vehicle then.

But don't be surprised when the majority of people refuse to pay 100% of the price for a vehicle they only use 3% of the time.

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

#292

Post by Groxx »

beachstartup wrote: post #211
scoofy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace bike with car. You seem to think that drivers are not massive traffic law violators? Speeding, double parking, tailgating, failing to signal, need i go on? Expecting an entire group to act like pristine angels before life saving laws can be put in place is asinine at best.

the problem is bicyclists tend to do things that are far more dangerous / serious: * running red lights * running stop signs * driving down the wrong side of the road * driving on sidewalks bikes are far less dangerous than cars, which is why nobody minds that they routinely break far worse rules. in addition, bicyclists routinely break the rules you mentioned.

Agreed, and I wish there would be fines and enforcement. Though for half of those you can frequently argue that the biker is avoiding more-common dangers to themselves, like having to squeeze between parked and moving cars where there isn't enough room to do so safely.

In the vast majority of America, including the vast majority of cities, biking is ludicrously poorly supported and heavily favors killing bicyclists over losing a lane. Not that this is any surprise, but it is what it is.

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

#293

Post by kumbasha »

genofon wrote: post #51

I'm wondering how much self-driving cars will improve the system? far less accidents, much faster, less traffic jams, more efficient, no traffic light, different speed limits etc...

0 day exploit kills 300 in a pileup on the freeway...

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

#294

Post by kumbasha »

sean-duffy wrote: post #192
pazra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the government was willing to pull those kind of tactics to have you killed, I'm pretty sure they could do it without self-driving cars.

Your government maybe. What about North Korea's government?

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

#295

Post by thrownaway2424 »

Qworg wrote: post #245
TeMPOraL wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.

LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better. The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.

Agreed about the eye. They are great for looking at whatever you point them at, which for drivers in my area is usually their iPhone. I'd be surprised if humans were terribly good at perceiving a meter-high object that appeared in their lane at a distance of 50m, because their occuli are occupied perceiving other things. I'm sure a self-driving car that had an unblinking human eye would be a fantastic instrument.

Anyway the LIDAR is not the only instrument you can put in an autonomous vehicle, right? You can have optical cameras, stereo cameras, infrared, whatever.

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

#296

Post by jessriedel »

Qworg wrote: post #258
jessriedel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?

Certainly. LIDAR resolution is related to a few things: - How many beams you're putting out and at what angles - How fast you're spinning and how fast you can get the data back. - How many points of data you can get through your bus If the Google Car is using the big Velodyne ( http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx ), it puts out 1.3 Mpt/second over a 26.8 degree vertical field of view. That makes it…

Thanks for all the LIDAR info!

A human seems to be able to differentiate pretty reliably (although not perfectly) between dry spots and drywall. And at 50 meters, I expect that binocular vision doesn't do much.

I wonder if people can use parallax (i.e. road being revealed differently) for a 2 inch object like drywall at those kinds of distances and speeds. Parallax is uses in Google's latest software lens blur, so I'm sure it's been in robot cars since the beginning.

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

#297

Post by ams6110 »

untog wrote: post #243
ignostic wrote: post #209

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges. Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

Liability should be pretty simple. Just like now, the owner of the car is liable. In my state this is the case even if someone else is driving; not sure this is the case elsewhere but that would seem to apply to a computer driver as well as a human one. The logic is, if you allow someone else to use your property and they cause damage with it, you are liable.

Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.

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

#298

Post by magicalist »

gfodor wrote: post #238
ForHackernews wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

Unfortunately the thing to think about here is that as these things become more mainstream, there will be less people who are even skilled enough to control a car. So in the long run, if the system works well, any part of the design that relies upon human intervention is doomed. Ultimately your stopgap would become the equivalent of giving the wheel to the child in the backseat: more dangerous than just letting the c…

On the other hand, it will be best case a decade or two before these things are out on the road en masse and even then only the youngest drivers wouldn't have gained many hours of driving experience. Meanwhile, in that time both automated car and sensor tech will have advanced quite a bit. It's only been a decade since that first DARPA challenge and five years since google started their project, after all.

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

#299

Post by TulliusCicero »

andrewfong wrote: post #264
untog wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges. Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

Legal liability seems to be a red herring IMHO. At the end of the day, it's an insurance company that pays for it all anyway, regardless of whose fault it is. And car insurance companies already have the capability to adjudicate and litigate a large number of crash-related legal challenges. If anything, Google could use the data collected by its autonomous vehicles to streamline that process. If I were Google, I woul…

Exactly. Who's at fault in a self-driving car crash? The car model+software combination (unless the driver explicitly did something negligent or reckless). But the insurance company will cover it, and simply adjust the cost of insurance each year based on how often that model+software combination crashed in the previous year.

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

#300

Post by hrktb »

> Jaywalking pedestrians.

There was a episode on this on the 99% invisible podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...

The above page has photos and a full transcript of the episode, I very highly recommand it.

This piece reminded me of the 'problem' of jaywalking because the complexity the self driving Googe car boast to be able to handle, could also be instead reduced or anhilated by adequate urban policies. There are movements to get the car out of urban areas [1] or at least make the pedestrian the 'owner' of the street, and I think self driving cars should be positionned more as an auto-pilot for long distances, rather than attempt to make sense of the current chaos in high density areas.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg ("you are the traffic", a Roumanian poster seen in /r/bycicling)

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