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Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

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Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#101

Post by englishVoodoo »

haberman wrote: post #47
roel_v wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might be true that the supported route are favourable, Gothenburg however do operate streetcars/trams together with regular buses as public transportation. These tracks will be hard to avoid in the city.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#102

Post by steven777400 »

thematt wrote: post #95
augustl wrote: post #35

I own a 2013 XC60 and as a programmer, I'm amazed at how well their current automation works in practice. The car reads road signs to show me the current speed limit in the dash (actual OCR, not a GPS database). It works amazingly well, except when it's very dark in the winter. Adaptive cruise control flawlessly follows cars based on radar, even in somewhat dramatic full stops, e.g. when there's suddenly heavy traffi…

Why would it bother OCR'ing road signs? That seems much more error prone and needlessly complex. That data is readily available from a data sources based on your GPS location, I know TomToms and other navigation devices have it.

I know in Seattle there are variable speed limit zones, where the signs are digital displays that can be changed at anytime to reflect appropriate speed limits for the current conditions.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#103

Post by frik »

nabla9 wrote: post #34
threeseed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently LIDAR does work in rain albeit with degradation in it's effectiveness. Regardless I wasn't aware of this before. Why would Google chose this technology ? It's bizarre.

There is nothing else that gets the accuracy Google needs. Sensors are currently unsolved problem. Multi wavelength radars don't yet have the accuracy and they don't work well with nonmetallic objects (There is limit of how much radar can use power (safely) and how expensive it can be. What works for F-22 don't work for Google) Google is not planning to monetize this technology anytime soon, despite the hype. The dif…

I am with you, except for your last sentence, which is incorrect.

Mercedes Benz from Germany is doing active research in dynamic computer vision of driverless cars since the 1980s.

"1758 km trip in the fall of 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark to a project meeting and back. Both longitudinal and lateral guidance were performed autonomously by vision. On highways, the robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h" ... "This is particularly impressive considering that the system used black-and-white video-cameras"

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns

"In August 2013, Daimler R&D with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/FZI, made a Mercedes-Benz S-class vehicle with close-to-production stereo cameras and radars drive completely autonomously for about 100 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, following the historic Bertha Benz Memorial Route."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#2010s

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#104

Post by mandeepj »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #71
jareds wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need a car in Singapore? I thought they had decent public transit?

They do, and generally it's a difficult place to have a car: * Severe congestion pricing * Expensive due to severe taxes (generally over 100k USD) * Licensing for a car is time-limited. I think this is about 10 years or so. The last point in particular makes it feasible to cycle out the entire country's cars in a relatively short time. EDIT: Add more newlines between bullets

>* Licensing for a car is time-limited. I think this is about 10 years or so.

In US it is 4 years. I was surprised to see that low time frame as in India it is at least 20 years. And, in US, you are also required to renew your registration plates every year

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#105

Post by shalmanese »

danielweber wrote: post #44
jareds wrote: post #42

I 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.

Google already thought of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#106

Post by koenigdavidmj »

mandeepj wrote: post #104
koenigdavidmj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, and generally it's a difficult place to have a car: * Severe congestion pricing * Expensive due to severe taxes (generally over 100k USD) * Licensing for a car is time-limited. I think this is about 10 years or so. The last point in particular makes it feasible to cycle out the entire country's cars in a relatively short time. EDIT: Add more newlines between bullets

>* Licensing for a car is time-limited. I think this is about 10 years or so. In US it is 4 years. I was surprised to see that low time frame as in India it is at least 20 years. And, in US, you are also required to renew your registration plates every year

What I mean is "you're not allowed to register a car again after that point". Most people sell it across the Strait in Malaysia. This distinguishes them from the US and India, where you can drive a car until it doesn't work anymore.

Also, your US numbers of course vary by state.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#107

Post by tzakrajs »

thematt wrote: post #95
augustl wrote: post #35

I own a 2013 XC60 and as a programmer, I'm amazed at how well their current automation works in practice. The car reads road signs to show me the current speed limit in the dash (actual OCR, not a GPS database). It works amazingly well, except when it's very dark in the winter. Adaptive cruise control flawlessly follows cars based on radar, even in somewhat dramatic full stops, e.g. when there's suddenly heavy traffi…

Why would it bother OCR'ing road signs? That seems much more error prone and needlessly complex. That data is readily available from a data sources based on your GPS location, I know TomToms and other navigation devices have it.

Those databases are quite often out of date and incomplete.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#108

Post by nabla9 »

jacquesm wrote: post #87
nabla9 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LIDAR Google uses takes more than a million measurements per second and has ~11 cm resolution.

Right, my camera takes more than a million measurements in 1/100th of a second and has a spatial resolution comparable to that or better depending on the distance. '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…

360 degree 3d map of its surroundings.

http://i.imgur.com/hmSc9HJ.jpg

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#110

Post by noselasd »

nawitus wrote: post #96
thematt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it bother OCR'ing road signs? That seems much more error prone and needlessly complex. That data is readily available from a data sources based on your GPS location, I know TomToms and other navigation devices have it.

At least in Finland, probably in Sweden too speed limits change often (every 6 months) due to winter. In my experience the GPS databases are extremely often not in sync, and you can't predict which speed limits change and when. In addition, there are electronic speed limits that change depending on the weather in real-time. OCR seems like a better option for these conditions.

And they can change faster than that. Yesterday they put up a 50km/h sign for half a kilometer at my drive to work due to some roadwork, today it was gone again.
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