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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

#141

Post by Qworg »

trhway wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. now you put second camera near-by and run stereo analysis algorithm to build 3D scene. 10+ years ago (DARPA Grand Challenge - where roots of Google self-driving car architecture comes from) with 1M cameras and the available hardware you'd get lucky to get…

You cannot do better than our eyes. The dynamic range of eyes plus the bit depth are unparalleled in any camera. We're also backed by a very strong pattern matching algorithm.

That said, stereo runs pretty damn fast these days. On ASICs. TYZX, who was bought by Intel, sold a stereo camera about 3 years ago that ran ~52 fps with full point cloud returns. I think those were running 2+ Mpx.

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

#142

Post by encoderer »

pedrocr wrote: post #98
chongli wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car. I think you're underestimating the number of people you'd have to pay to get full coverage of cities. Most people do not drive around on every street in a systematic way; they have a small number of destinations and they usually take the sam…

You'd have to optimize for that. You can add incentives for people to mix up their routes, and you can use a much smaller number of dedicated cars to cover whatever is left. My point was that if the problem you're trying to solve is "StreetView is too expensive to operate" you're not going to go and create self driving cars, you'd do something simpler. That doesn't mean that once you do have self-driving cars you wou…

Not to kick the guy that's down, but "I wish we had more recent streetview, OH I KNOW lets build a totally autonomous car" sounds to me somewhat like "people want their postal mail online. OH I KNOW lets send somebody to every house and pick up the mail the mailman left."

Not unlike the experience for drivers on Lyft and UberX it would be trivial for Google to create a rig and an app. You set the magnetic camera rig on your roof and sign in. It shows you available routes and how much they'll pay for them. The offer increases every so often if nobody selects the route. Done.

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

#143

Post by kalleboo »

PeterisP wrote: post #62
ygra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Sweden as soon as you're in a residential area or out in the countryside, unmarked priority-to-the-right crossings are the norm. And if cars from all directions in a crossing arrive at once, you end up with an ambiguous 4-way stop situation.

In the countryside you'll often see this warning sign to remind you that "just because your road is bigger and faster than the one you're about to cross doesn't mean you have priority" http://www.transportstyrelsen.se/Vagmarken/Varningsmarken/A2...

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

#144

Post by jpatokal »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #106
mandeepj wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* 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.

No, Singapore does allow you to register the car again -- problem is, this requires paying for a new "Certificate of Entitlement", which are sold at auction for >US$70k each. So most people switch to a new car instead.

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

#145

Post by ams6110 »

MrClean wrote: post #5

“The test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption, and merging traffic all by themselves,” This is an important step, although I must say they appear to be far behind Google. My money is on Google getting to an acceptable deployment phase far earlier.

lane following, speed adaption, and merging traffic all by themselves

Well, that's better than most human Volvo drivers can do, by my experience. Whenever I see a car make a bone-headed move in traffic, chances are it's a Volvo.

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

#146

Post by jpatokal »

mkempe wrote: post #125
bra-ket wrote: post #79

did they warn the pedestrians?

I know you meant this as a joke.. however, Volvo cars do watch for pedestrians and automatically stop for them if needs be. In the worst case, there is an external airbag that will deploy in front of the windshield to avoid the worst types of injuries based on decades of analysis of car accidents with pedestrians (in Sweden).

Except when they don't, as demonstrated in the rather famous fail below during a PR demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcJ9xgBZJdI

The explanation was "The failure of the test was due to the dummy not being set up properly", which I find rather less than reassuring.

http://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/volvo-crash-test-goes-wro...

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

#147

Post by trhway »

Qworg wrote: post #141
trhway wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. now you put second camera near-by and run stereo analysis algorithm to build 3D scene. 10+ years ago (DARPA Grand Challenge - where roots of Google self-driving car architecture comes from) with 1M cameras and the available hardware you'd get lucky to get…

You cannot do better than our eyes. The dynamic range of eyes plus the bit depth are unparalleled in any camera. We're also backed by a very strong pattern matching algorithm. That said, stereo runs pretty damn fast these days. On ASICs. TYZX, who was bought by Intel, sold a stereo camera about 3 years ago that ran ~52 fps with full point cloud returns. I think those were running 2+ Mpx.

>You cannot do better than our eyes. The dynamic range of eyes plus the bit depth are unparalleled in any camera.

this is one of the reasons why i said about several cameras - each camera, pair of them, can cover different [overlapping] subranges of light sensitivity and each do it better than eyes in each respective subrange, and thus the integrated image may be better than eyes'

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

#149

Post by songgao »

bluthru wrote: post #75

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.

A lot of companies are working on WAVE/DSRC. Here's a demo from Volvo: http://youtu.be/tasa3D1vVTc

And yes the safety applications like emergency brake, intersection collision warning, or curve speed warning etc., have high priority but other Applications like mapping are also possible. I think current mapping applications use road side infrastructures (also through DSRC) but I guess you could share traffic information (Waze?) using inter-vehicle communication.

Here's an technical paper if anybody is interested: http://secs.oakland.edu/~gpcorser/vanet-kenny-DSRC.pdf

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

#150

Post by refurb »

chiph wrote: post #59
McGuffin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you'd bought a lot more Volvos, they still would've had a market for that option.

With draconian CAFE requirements coming (49 mpg average [1][2] for vehicles the size of a Honda Fit), manufacturers are really ramping up their efforts to be compliant. Automatic transmissions now can deliver 1-2 better mpg than a manual, plus sometimes faster shift times. You're also seeing a lot more CVT transmissions vs. conventional planetary gear ones these days because they typically deliver 2+ mpg better econo…

That's the first time I've heard of automatic transmissions giving better mileage than manuals. I always thought the drive train loses on an automatic transmission (mainly the torque converter) was the issue? Has that changed?
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