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Digital Cameras Help Alert Sleepy Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting story on how digital cameras are being mounted in cars to watch the eye movements of drivers to make sure that they are awake. The cars include two cameras, one watching the road and one watching the driver. If there is something on the road that is a danger and the driver doesn't see, the car alerts the driver. Pretty neat technology."
I can see the obvious saftey benefit from this, but perhaps the possible privacy conerns should be considered.
Suppose this follows a logical step and they add a link to a centralized server that monitored traffic volume to help the results be more accurate.
Suppose insurance companies were able to gain access to data this could produce, and started factoring your on-road alertness into their rate
Yano on second thought, that doesn't sound that bad at all.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
I would imiagine it would be a false positive. Which is much better than a false negative, false postive makes you a little annoyed for a short while. False negative sends you out of controll into a ditch, your decision.
If there is something on the road that is a danger and the driver doesn't see, the car alerts the driver.
Now, if only they can devise a way to keep 85 year olds who think that it's their god given right to drive until the day they die, from slamming on the gas and destroying buildings and killing pedestrians because they thought it was the break pedal - or driving into THROUGH AN AIRPORT because they thought you return your car at the Hertz inside the airport.
Will sun glasses make the whole thing break? Maybe even the glare from my regular glasses during a sunset, or sunrise could throw the whole thing off!
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..but shouldn't it be the drivers responsibility to stay awake while driving? If you're tired enough that you need a camera to watch your eye movement to make sure you aren't falling asleep, should you really be driving?
everyday is another shooter.
There are already vehicles that allow the passengers to relax in peace. They are called trains!
The problem with this technology in cars is that it assumes that cars are the only vehicles on the road. What about the pedal and motorcyclists for example?
Social problems require social solutions, not technological band-aids. The reason we have so many sleepy drivers in the first place is a combination of bad urban planning that results in millions of people taking extra-long commutes, one person to a car, and erosion of labor rights that makes it possible for employers to overwork their employees and tire them.
As much as I would like to believe that there are people striving to make automatic automotive technology available tomorrow, I have a sneaking suspicion that some people out there who make a living off of a class 4 license will argue that this cannot and will never replace a human.
Pretty neat technology
What? This is not neat. This is a step backwards. If drivers gets accustomed that their car will alert them if they're about to hit something, it will probably encourage them to contiue that extra hour of unsafe driving.
Underholdning.info
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This popped up a year ago. When will Slashdot actually accept news that is up and current, rather than accepting old posts?
--
The trouble with pedants is that they're always right.
I would imiagine it would be a false positive. Which is much better than a false negative, false postive makes you a little annoyed for a short while.
Yes but too many false positives will cause you to ignore it or find a way to disable it entirely.
The problem with all these safety features is that people feel too safe in their cars.
Going to fast? My wonderfull ABS system will bring me to a halt no matter what. Accelerating beyond my limits? Why, ASC will keep me on track. DSC will keep me on the road in those nasty corners. The new Citroen C5 has that nifty lane departure alert system, so why would I even keep my hands on the wheel, my car'll tell me when I'm flying off the road just in time!
Ok, ok, maybe I'm exagerating things a bit here, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that actually believe this stuff (or at least appear to be driving as if they believe it).
IMHO, the driver is and should always be responsible for his/her car, not some autopilot. People should be made aware of the risks of ignoring these systems more, than they should be made aware of situations they should've seen for themselves.
Know the limits of yourself. Know the limits of your car. If you go beyond either of those, no system out there now nor in future will keep you on the road.
The amount of technology designed to let the car driver fall asleep is terrifying to those who actually have something to loose from an accident.
I always thought that an interesting experiment would be to remove the driver's seatbelt and fix a large spike to the steering wheel. I suspect the number of accidents would go down ;-)
Dave
more dangerous than every other group except teenagers (who also shouldn't be allowed to drive so young)
:-) Of course, these weren't city streets, mud bogging and farm driving probably don't count, except for the fact that they were real trucks, cars, tractors, etc. Not sure I would let my kids do the same...
Thats why I started drive before I was a teen. By the time I was legal, I was a seasoned pro.
On the other hand, I hope I have the grace and intelligence to hang up my keys when the time comes.
B
Today is a good day to code.
The idea behind this article is completely wrong. If you're tired at the wheel you DO NOT need a bit of technology telling you to wake up. You need to STOP DRIVING before you fucking kill someone.
:)
And if you're not aware of what's going on on the road in the first place you should not be driving AT ALL. You should be a passenger in a vechile driven by a competent driver.
But along the same lines...
I've always thought a good idea for the use of digital cameras would be for each vechile to be fitted with four small reasonable quality cameras facing front, rear and sides of the vechile. These would all then feed into a small sealed "blackbox" unit which would store the last hour or so of video footage from each angle.
That way when some idiot driver is asleep at the wheel, changing their CD player, shaving, talking on their bloody 'phone etc. etc. and causes an accident there's absolutely no question of who is at fault. Assuming at least one of the units survives the collision you just check the "blackbox" footage from the vechiles involved.
"Yes Sir/Madam, YOU are 100% to blame and YOU will PAY for the consequences of your actions" (in both a financial and possibly legal sense).
As a cyclist (both motor and mostyl pedal) I am continually amazed at the poor road skills of some drivers and their continued "oh I didn't see you there" attitude. That's because you were'nt fucking paying attention to what's going on you fucking retard.
The only thing better would be the enfoced adoption of D. H. Lawrences idea for road safety. e.g. Put a large metal spike in the middle of the steering wheel 'cause that WILL make you look where you're going !)
Drivers today seem to think their car is some sort of extension to their fucking living room. They pay little enough attention to the road as it is. If you give them any more sensors to rely on they'll start falling asleep at the wheel ("Gee the tech'll wake me if there's danger")
Ah I fell better for a small rant in the morning
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Whilst speed limits are of their nature granular, and unable to take account of local weather conditions, what you say does not follow. Given a set speed limit for a particular road (realistic or not) a system where all cars drive at or under the speed limit will always be safer than a system where some drive over it.
How many trillions are you willing to spend?
JFK's vision cost America 5% of it's GDP.
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Fallacy. The real problem is real-time, complex, intelligent decision on incomplete data. Humans are remarkably able to do this, but machine intelligence still hasn't progressed far enough.
Imagine an autonomous vehicle that has to do about 10 decisions a second (this is not enough, but this helps clear matters). If your system is 99.99% accurate this means an error every 1000s, i.e. every 15 minutes or so. You wouldn't be able to drive very far.
There are no real-world intelligent decision systems that are 99.99% accurate in the world today. Far far far from it. Complex real-world decision systems are more like 60% accurate, just like the face recognition system that got a trial at Logan Airport a couple of years ago.
Like Neal Stephenson remarked on Slashdot yesterday, everyone is afraid of self-replicating nano-technology until one realizes that while the hardware is progressing very fast, the software is still crap.
Just like the X-prize hasn't put anybody in orbit yet or the Turing prize so far has only resulted in conversations that are funny for 5 minutes, the real thing is still not within grasp. It looks like it but it's not.
FYI I'm a researcher in AI.
And building a dedicated railbed and running an AutoTrain would be even easier, far more efficent, and MUCH faster.
This is the thing that ticks me off about all of this "Intelligent Hiway" crap - we KNOW how to build trains. We KNOW how to build railbeds capable of supporting 300MPH trains. We KNOW how to build rail cars that will hold automobiles. R&D? We need no "R" - the research is done, we just need the development.
However, since we DON'T need any research, nobody wants to look at this technology - it isn't "sexy". So everybody talks about building more intelligence into the car - but of course we will need a huge quantity of money to fund research for those pesky problems like actually dealing with the one driver who's car is NOT on full automatic drive who INSISTS upon getting into that lane.
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And this is an important point. They are group vehicles.
What this means is that they have to stop at every station on the route in the offchance that someone wants to get on or off. This makes it slow, the average speed is only a fraction of their peak or rated speed. Because they are group vehicles they also have to run to a schedule which means that you have to wait for a train. Both features make journey times significantly longer than an individual vehicle would take.
Also, because the rolling stock is carrying a large group, it is heavy and relatively few of them are built which means no mass manufacture. The supporting infrastructure must also be heavy to cope with the size of the vehicle. This makes it expensive.
Ok, you've got me started now. Group vehicles also simply can't go where everyone wants to go, their ridership is only the few percentage of the population who are with in easy reach of a station. If you add more stations to increase the number of people who use it the trains have to spend more time stopped and average speed suffers further making it slower. Because they don't go exactly where you want to go you have to switch modes or lines, each time you switch you incur a journey time penalty waiting on the schedule.
Scheduled vehicles have to run whether there are people to use it or not, this kills the overall efficiency, the vehicles are heavy, accelerating them and decelerating them takes a lot of energy. During rush hour the ridership is such that it's very efficient. As soon as you get outside the rush hour period and the ridership falls so does the efficiency.
So you end up paying a lot for relatively poor performance.
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