81–90 of 183 posts
Has anything been said about an open protocol for inter-car communication? What about sharing point cloud data? I have a bad feeling that Google is going to keep everything sealed in Google Maps. The industry would benefit from sharing all of their data with OpenStreetMap.
Yes: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/03/us-autos-technolog...
But I don't think it's for mapping, just safety.
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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.
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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.
I have no doubt that smarter roads are in our future, but they pose too high of a price for wide spread adoption of autonomous vehicles at the outset.
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> 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.
It's not a good comparison: flying vs driving have totally different response times(minutes vs seconds). One could even say people can't respond in a good way in seconds , unless they keep full attention at all times, which beats the purpose of self driving cars.
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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…
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> 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.
The driver won't have to be vigilant or even awake for the whole time, only in emergencies. I'm assuming the car would stop or slow down automatically in case of any problem and notify the driver. Good point on the pilots, though I always felt that it's unnecessary for them to stay awake (especially on cargo planes). And it looks like many do fall asleep inflight: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/10/08/oukoe-uk-bri…
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> They needs millions of very accurate distance measurements per second to drive. I was with you up to there.
LIDAR Google uses takes more than a million measurements per second and has ~11 cm resolution.
'A million measurements' sounds really impressive but it does not have much to do with anything. What's a measurement? A single distance measurement in front of the car? Ok, at what opening angle, how many returns, how many pulses / second and so on.
As it stands that's just a 'big number' but those are not impressive at all without context.
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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.
Europe doesn't generally use 4-way stop signs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-way_stop ) in the traffic regulations; intersections tend to be either regulated, or with one road designated as the priority, or as roundabouts, not like this. I've driven a bit around Europe, but I have never seen a single such intersection in my life - if they exist, they must be rare. Of course, "if you have an intersection of non-pr…
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4-way stops exist in Sweden. Quoting from Wikipedia at http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopplikt : > Vissa korsningar har en stoppskylt vid varje väg, ett så kallat flervägsstopp. Det innebär att alla som kommer till korsningen måste stanna, oavsett vilken väg man kommer på. Tanken är att man vid flervägsstopp ska ta ögonkontakt med medtrafikanter för att på så sätt komma överens om vem som ska köra först. Or my transla…
Do you actually have them in Sweden? I was taught similar rules back when getting a driving licence, but it doesn't neccessarily mean that such intersections exist - I was told about intersections that were like that in 1960ies, but those spots have traffic lights now.
If you're more curious, see http://www.trafikverket.se/PageFiles/3038/komplett_slutrappo... , among others. That one talks about how they were tested out during the 1980s, and by 2007 there were a few hundred in the country.
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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.