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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

#321

Post by theg2 »

lepht wrote: post #315
theg2 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ride a bike and drive a car. And while doing both, I do my best to obey the laws and not injure other people. In Boston, and more specifically in my area of Cambridge we have major issues with drivers turning without looking at the bike lane and bikers running through red lights or riding on sidewalks. In MA, we have very specific laws regarding how bikes are to be treated under the law and whenever riding I abide…

I'm also in the Boston area (Somerville) and have been wondering about the proper way to respond to right turns with a cyclist in the bike lane behind me. When I have right-of-way and use my turn signal ahead of time, shouldn't I have the ability to turn right without waiting for the bike to pass (similar to how the cars behind me must wait for me to make my turn before continuing?)

I believe (so don't take it as fact), if your turn signal is on and they're behind you, you have the right of way. IF they edge forward to the line (as many do, which I think is legal?) and are to your front-right you should wait.

Again, driving and biking laws get muddled so it's hard to tell.

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

#322

Post by diydsp »

fancyketchup wrote: post #283
chillingeffect wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology". > I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. II. Also, in yo…

> It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received si…

I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.

If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity.

Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high.

As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place.

PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.

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

#323

Post by paul_f »

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.

This is not simple issue at all. Who's at fault if anti-lock brakes don't work as expected? What about cruise control? The new cruise control that auto-follows? What about lane-following technology?

We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

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

#324

Post by BrandonMarc »

robszumski wrote: post #230
larubbio wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.

These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder. Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.

why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination.

Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?

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

#325

Post by BrandonMarc »

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'".

Minority Report comes to mind. And, I, Robot (I think). That's just a few examples of stories in which futuristic cars are conveniently control-able by the police when necessary.

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

#326

Post by rthomas6 »

hackuser wrote: post #304
rthomas6 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

That is possible, but fear-motivated reasoning is rarely rational.

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

#327

Post by dragonwriter »

paul_f wrote: post #323
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.

This is not simple issue at all. Who's at fault if anti-lock brakes don't work as expected? What about cruise control? The new cruise control that auto-follows? What about lane-following technology? We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

> We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

Well "shift" implies that it must be one place or the other; in reality, liability is not zero-sum, so one party having reduced liability doesn't imply another party has more, and vice versa.

This is particularly the caseWe are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

In the case of automotive systems, there's no reason the driver, owner, and manufacturer all can't be liable, and no reason that any changes in the degree of liability for one have to be reflected at all in the liabilities of the others.

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

#328

Post by aetherson »

TheEzEzz wrote: post #307
dsr_ wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude.

It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.

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

#329

Post by aembleton »

Theodores wrote: post #265
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving. The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup…

Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety. Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances. The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key inn…

Here's the Fith Gear video that you mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emtLLvXrrFs

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

#330

Post by fancyketchup »

diydsp wrote: post #322
fancyketchup wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received si…

I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle. If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity. Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking…

> I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.

This is not "synchronous detection" in the way I meant it. I don't mean this as a put-down, but it may be instructive to Google "lock-in amplifier," a term I mentioned in my previous post.

All of your other concerns are addressed by appropriate choice of PRN code(s). Additional vehicles, which operate without the need for coordination, merely raise the noise floor. They do not "jam" each other. It should be obvious that a minimum S/N ratio is required for the LIDAR system to work and further that an arbitrarily-high number of LIDAR transmitters therefore cannot coexist. However, it is far from obvious (to me, at least without learning more about LIDAR and plugging in some numbers to a model) that a congested freeway of driverless cars would have "too many" LIDAR transmitters.

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