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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

#301

Post by TulliusCicero »

pinaceae wrote: post #213
bertil wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe. Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concent…

sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.

Yes, and surely some people (particularly in less dense suburbs and rural areas) will continue to own cars. They will just be self-driving cars, because manually operated cars will be illegal.

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

#302

Post by voicereasonish »

tokenadult wrote: post #151
voicereasonish wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30,000 deaths a year in a country like the US is nothing. More people die from falling down the stairs. Should we ban stairs next?

Your statement is factually incorrect according to official statistics,[1] which I found through a very easy Google search after reading your comment. (Note that the statistic shown is for all accidental falls, not just falls on stairways, and even in the aggregate all falls cause fewer deaths than car crashes.) [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm

Pretty comparable - 26,000 accidental falls, 30,000 car deaths.

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

#303

Post by TulliusCicero »

iron_ball wrote: post #122
josefresco wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

As a sometime cyclist, I agree that cyclists should abide by traffic laws. I assume this was downvoted for tone. The premise is undeniable. Bicycles should obey the laws. Greater rule adherence means a more predictable, and thus safer, street.

Stopping at a stop sign in residential neighborhoods as a cyclist is frequently stupid. Idaho even has a law that lets cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs, which makes perfect sense. Cyclists aren't a large threat to other road users (pedestrians/cars/other cyclists) the way cars are.

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

#304

Post by hackuser »

rthomas6 wrote: post #125
gbog wrote: post #120

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so…

I agree with you, but I think I can explain some of the rationale behind wanting big cars. Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

A couple of counter-intuitive thoughts:

* The smaller car will stop and maneuver more quickly, avoiding more accidents.

* I read a study years ago that said the relative sizes and weights of vehicles did not significantly impact the outcomes for the humans inside. Instead, the relative positions of the 'hard-points' did (I forget the term, but the parts that don't crumple on impact). If you rear-end a truck and its rear hard-point goes through your windshield into your head (albeit a personal hard-point), that's bad news. If its hard-point hits your vehicle's hard-point then I imagine you mostly suffer from the sudden stop, at least in modern cars.

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

#305

Post by gfodor »

konstruktor wrote: post #248
gfodor wrote: post #161

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…

You are thinking of the wrong failure mode. Going too fast to react to a piece of debris is something a well programmed robotic car will never encounter in the first place. It will not go faster than the limits posed by its perception (known) and road conditions (approximately known), and err on the side of caution. It knows no impatience. It is aware of its surroundings at all times, which means it may go faster if…

Smart. A good lesson in identifying misplaced assumptions, thanks.

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

#306

Post by TheEzEzz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #261
Wilya wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use. I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

Part of the storage space requirements for cars in normal use is access space for human drivers and to allow random access entrance and exits. Cars as a service can eliminate much of the storage space requirement.

As well as 'redundant' storage, since each car effectively gets multiple parking spots at the moment (a dedicated garage, plus a guaranteed spot at work, etc). Once cars are automated you only need enough storage spots for the cars not on the road, which is much smaller.

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

#307

Post by TheEzEzz »

dsr_ wrote: post #249
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…

If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".

Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.

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

#308

Post by Qworg »

jessriedel wrote: post #296
Qworg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Less that perceive the depth (2 inches at 50 meters is tough, especially from above) but that we're really good at pattern matching (vague square thing in the road? likely not road).

You can think of parallax as stereo vision repeated over and over again with different cameras. Cameras/depth sensing has a hard time at range, since the resolution for depth decreases rapidly towards subpixel.

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

#309

Post by BrandonMarc »

Joeri wrote: post #291
chillingeffect wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly, people pay 100% the price of a microwave oven, which is usually used just a few minutes per day.

Going that direction ... Did you know? A typical microwave oven uses massively more electricity simply powering the LED clock compared to the amount it uses actually cooking food.

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

#310

Post by TeMPOraL »

Loughla wrote: post #208
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of…

Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people. And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of. I've never hit anyone, and I'd rathe…

> Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people.

Even if this was thrownaway2424's argument - which it isn't - it would still be valid. It actually illustrates one of the biggest problem with people - the public's inability to "shut up and multiply". If we would replace (ceteris paribus) human drivers, that kill hundreds of people a year, with self-driving cars, which kill a few people a year, then it'd be a clear-cut Good Thing, a win, the right thing to do.

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