21–30 of 85 posts
/rant
I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers. IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues a…
Some of the more interesting research in this area uses infrared to detect the change in heat of a shadowed hole versus flat ground. Of course, that only works when there's sunshine to provide the heat source.
P.S. Google people reading this (Urmson, Ferguson, etc), please consider this my annual reminder of the awesomeness of your Google Sydney office and the large quantities of autonomous field robotics engineers training and working within walking distance of it, for wages that could be doubled without your budgets even noticing...
This seems to be a pretty common opinion, but I fail to see why anyone feels they have a "right" to be told Google's plans, strategies and ideas, much less their development mistakes and failures for a thing that is not a product currently available (or even close to it).
I realize there is a very real fear many people have about autonomous vehicles because it's something they don't/can't understand. And while that's something Google's marketing/PR department may want to deal with, this fearmongering attitude of "Google won't tell me exactly how it's going to work... it must not be safe... oh no we're all going to die!!! " is just getting ridiculous.
I remember a few of these difficulties being mentioned in Sebastian Thrun's Self-Driving Cars course on Udacity. It's been awhile, but I seem to remember the snow discussion in particular. The problem wasn't just slippery conditions, but the question of how the vehicle can localize itself when the various visual cues that it uses are covered in snow (e.g. road lines). Pretty interesting stuff.
Also, most 3-lane roads magically turn into 2-lane roads, and many 2-lane roads turn into 3-lane roads etc.
I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers. IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues a…
Exactly. These are edge cases that will undoubtedly be better handled as the technology matures in the near future. There no reason that these (still very speculative) issues should slow down adoption.
I am making a bold prediction that it will be decades before a self driving car can drive itself safely on Indian streets. Road Signs ? None. Rules ? They're more like suggestions. Roads ? What Road ?
It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles. Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the ca…
Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to sca…
The problem with emergent technology is that it's what people tend to be most afraid of, and if there ends up being situations a robotic car absolutely cannot handle that's known about, how long will it take for people to start abusing it?
And for unhandled exceptions...awhile back I was driving up 280 and a police officer pulled out in front of traffic, flipped his lights on, and started weaving back and forth across all lanes of traffic. All the drivers slowed down and kept behind the officer, obviously not sure what was going on. The officer stopped weaving at a couple points along about a one-mile stretch to get out of his car and pick up an item off the freeway, then got back in and resumed weaving, until he got up to a previously-pulled-over car and parked behind another officer.
That's definitely not something they covered in driver's ed, apart from "if something unusual is happening, slow down". But how long would it take for it to make the news if a smart car in that situation passed the car on a weave and struck a drunk guy that was stumbling along the freeway at 85mph, do you think? And do you really think every possible situation that occurs during driving will eventually be able to be handled by a smart car?
Another example, any point you run into a car or random other vehicle that's double-parked in the city. If the car can only figure out that pedestrians are blobs of pixels, does it have sufficient resolution to figure out how far away that oncoming car is, or will it just patiently sit behind that moving truck until they're done and start moving again?
There's a lot of edge cases for this tech, and most if not all of them have potentially fatal exception cases if you fail to handle them correctly.
>"Some experts are bothered by Google’s refusal to provide that sort of safety-related information... the public 'has a right to be concerned' about Google’s reticence: 'This is a very early-stage technology, which makes asking these kinds of questions all the more justified.'" This seems to be a pretty common opinion, but I fail to see why anyone feels they have a "right" to be told Google's plans, strategies and id…
I remember a few of these difficulties being mentioned in Sebastian Thrun's Self-Driving Cars course on Udacity. It's been awhile, but I seem to remember the snow discussion in particular. The problem wasn't just slippery conditions, but the question of how the vehicle can localize itself when the various visual cues that it uses are covered in snow (e.g. road lines). Pretty interesting stuff.
I think there are better potential solutions for a self driving car to orient itself in those kinds of conditions than for a person. I've driven in miserable weather, and it is very disconcerting - you just guess and go. A self driving car could take measurements of the road + gps coords + look its map database to know how many lanes there should be, then estimated where the lanes and limit lines are. Once my eyes fa…
The maps would get magnitudes better the year the cars were unleashed.
I am making a bold prediction that it will be decades before a self driving car can drive itself safely on Indian streets. Road Signs ? None. Rules ? They're more like suggestions. Roads ? What Road ?
I imagine some kind of "paranoia" setting where the car just assumes that anything it sees moving can and will accelerate towards it or its immediate path.