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Sebastian Thrun and Google's Driverless Car (video)

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Re: Sebastian Thrun and Google's Driverless Car (video)

#11

Post by georgemcbay »

nswanberg wrote: post #8
Goronmon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd be more impressed with a car-less society. You are basically saying a society without need for any transportation whatsoever. That seems a bit of an unrealistic goal for anytime in the near future.

What did humanity do to get around before the 20th century? I'm not sure that autophil is advocating eliminating cars and roads altogether. Maybe he is. But it seems legitimate to be concerned about removing one limiting factor of car use--the patience and stamina of the driver. A 90 minute each way commute would be possible for more drivers, which isn't necessarily a net benefit for humanity given the increased road…

Most people wouldn't want a 90 minute commute even if they didn't have to actively drive much of the time. That's still 3 hours a day lost to sitting in a car, which isn't an ideal environment to do much of anything even if the car is driving itself.

But even if the commutes do inch up somewhat, that should be offset by new opportunities to save energy via algorithmic collaboration. Future generation self-driving cars could organize in all sorts of energy-saving ways that human drivers aren't practically capable of doing (eg. self-driving cars could intelligently draft one another).

Re: Sebastian Thrun and Google's Driverless Car (video)

#12

Post by agildehaus »

espinchi wrote: post #4

This field of research is far more advanced than I thought, actually. For instance, in the minute 25:12, they show a graph that compares how often the time to collision among a human driver (a professional one, actually) and the self-driving car. For small reaction times, the self-driving car outperforms the humans by far. It is of course expected, but it shows that driverless cars are not that distant in the future…

A plastic bag could also fly right onto the LIDAR, completely obstruct it, and it wouldn't matter what the software is capable of. These cars are going to need some sensor redundancy.

The Velodyne LIDAR Google uses costs somewhere near $75,000. I realize these sensors are new tech and are likely to nosedive in price, but having two is currently tremendously expensive.

There needs to be a LIDAR unit that performs as well for a lot less before these are going to ever hit regular people.

Re: Sebastian Thrun and Google's Driverless Car (video)

#14

Post by uncoder0 »

autophil wrote: post #5

I'd be more impressed with a car-less society. More cars, different cars, smarter cars aren't the answer. It just leads to more roads, more urban sprawl, more pollution on the planet.

Most cars are not utilized 90% of the time[1] Google cars could effectively reduce the number of cars required for our transportation needs by a very large amount. I actually wrote a paper about this in 2007 when I was working on the DARPA Grand Challenge.

[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2012/06/23/parking-its-what-your-car...

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