anyone has any idea where their location data (i.e map) is coming from?
I'm guessing Lantmäteriet (National Land Survey - https://www.lantmateriet.se/).
Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
41–50 of 183 posts
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#42I wonder what the first country that will allow completely automated cars with no human driver is? As a blind person I wonder if that would be enough to have me consider migrating from the U.S. depending on the country.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are probably trying to solve the same problem from two different directions. Google appears to be making an advanced and expensive solution to "full" autonomous driving. The limitation will not be in where it can go, but it is initially limited in weather/environmental conditions. The target audience is likely not production cars in the short term, but a system like theirs can for example make their stre…
4-way stop turn-taking is a problem that does not exist in europe btw
Oh? At least in Germany it's that you have to yield to a driver to the right (ignoring priority roads) but if you have an intersection of non-priority roads and a car from each direction someone has to make a decision to go first, otherwise it's a deadlock.
Unless I misunderstood the problem.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#44I wonder what the first country that will allow completely automated cars with no human driver is? As a blind person I wonder if that would be enough to have me consider migrating from the U.S. depending on the country.
You should seriously consider approaching car companies. There will be some (understandable) public resistance to automatic cars, but you could make an excellent poster boy for their benefits.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#45No rotating laser dome on the roof?
LIDAR does not work in rain, on wet roads or in the snow. Google car drives only in good weather in California for a reason. In Sweden they could drive maybe a week in a year. ... Sommaren är kort de mesta regnar bort ..
There is "Rain Room" art installation that uses depth sensing IR cameras (not LIDAR) to stop the raining around peoples in the room:
http://youtu.be/EkvazIZx-F0?t=1m56s
Maybe it works only because they use multiple cameras and they don't need too high resolution.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.
Google's system is not yet arbitrary. They prerun the roads the system drives on. I'm excited to see more "in the wild" units - more competition and innovation is always a good thing.
I don't see "Google needs to pre-map the route" as a hurdle at all. Even if Google had never been in my area, I would not mind one bit having to do my daily commute manually for a week while the car builds more and more detailed maps of the route, if it saved me the hassle of the commute for months thereafter.
Plus, every time the automatic car goes over the road, it's presumably checking its prior maps and flagging any anomalies from its preset mission. It still needs to recognize a new stop sign, but if a stop sign disappears, it will stop anyway while waiting for an answer on "was it was taken out on purpose, or did some kids steal it?".
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.
But those 50 kms are, according to the article, 'main commuter arteries' which to me makes it seem that they selected a small set of roads not to make the driving circumstances easier but to be able to more easily monitor the cars that drive there and to be able to reproduce similar situations more easily, to test improvements to certain algorithms or hardware. So basically they're testing under the 'worst' circumsta…
It seems unlikely to me that the supported routes have train tracks, construction cones, bike lanes, etc. -- the kinds of difficult problems of urban driving that Google has put a lot of resources into solving.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are probably trying to solve the same problem from two different directions. Google appears to be making an advanced and expensive solution to "full" autonomous driving. The limitation will not be in where it can go, but it is initially limited in weather/environmental conditions. The target audience is likely not production cars in the short term, but a system like theirs can for example make their stre…
4-way stop turn-taking is a problem that does not exist in europe btw
Actually it does exist but is rarely used : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-way_stop
In Europe you can have ambiguous situations with the priority to the right, where you are supposed to be courteous and wave the driver if both (or more) have the right of way.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#49I can't wait for self driving tech to be put into use - transportation will get cheaper and faster (no more 8-10 hours driving limit bs), not to mention that one or two persons could drive a dozen trucks filled with cargo (though a lot of truckers will hate that)...
> transportation will get cheaper and faster (no more 8-10 hours driving limit bs)
Why do you say that? Somebody is still going to need to be awake at the controls, at least for the first few decades of self driving tech. There's a reason pilots on planes don't go to sleep when the auto-pilot kicks on.
Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
LIDAR does not work in rain, on wet roads or in the snow. Google car drives only in good weather in California for a reason. In Sweden they could drive maybe a week in a year. ... Sommaren är kort de mesta regnar bort ..
Google currently has a req out for a electromechanical engineer to work on a new sensor system. I'm betting they're building a new sensor for their vehicle - rotating, but perhaps not LIDAR. Cracking the heavy rain/snow problem would require more than just a new design though - you'd need a totally different sensor modality, a mix of sensors that can extract enough data, or a system that's far more robust to noise.
I realize the costs would be high, but would there be a way to embed some information in/near the roadway that would assist the onboard systems? I think there might be some advantages in making the road smarter in addition to the car.