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Stanley and the Conquest of the DARPA Challenge
geekboy_x writes "Wired has a great in-depth piece on the Stanford team that won the $2 million DARPA prize. If you remember last year's disaster - with most vehicles falling off the road in the first kilometer or so - this victory becomes all the more amazing. The fact that the Stanford team used a 'tailgating' strategy is the best surprise in the article."
In order to run, one must first learn to walk...
From TFA on 7 ways cars are already robots:
"4. Lane-Departure Prevention
Nissan has a prototype that uses cameras and software to detect white lines and reflective markers. If the system determines the vehicle is drifting, it will steer the car back into the proper lane."
I've driven enough roads under construction that I would be seriously afraid that my car would steer me into oncoming traffic because road workers haven't bothered to paint over lines that were previously there.
Personally, I'd be interested in how these vehicles do:
1. On regular highways.
2. At speeds other than the 5 to 25 MPH tested.
I realize they're not built for that. I would just like to see how they do applying what they "learned" in the desert to real traffic situations.
From Wired: The resulting liability issues are a major hurdle. If a robotically driven car gets in an accident, who is to blame? If a software bug causes a car to swerve off the road, should the programmer be sued, or the manufacturer? Or is the accident victim at fault for accepting the driving decisions of the onboard computer? Would Ford or GM be to blame for selling a "faulty" product, even if, in the larger view, that product reduced traffic deaths by tens of thousands?
It figures. A technological advance that would cut the number of traffic deaths by about 95% by taking drunks and maniacs out from behind the wheel, and preventing 93 year-old men with dementia from killing people, will be bogged down by liability issues should the robot kill someone. C'mon people! Even the best system will not prevent a fluke accident or yes, even a bit of bad code, from killing someone, but weight that against the number of road-rage infested idiots on the road now, driving at 100+ mph, swerving in and out of traffic, and I think libility needs to be the furthest thing from anyone's mind.
Just don't let Microsoft write the software.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
was when Thun explained how the vehicle was taught to drive by following a human driver and adapting its algorithms according to his behavior, gaining much better results than "force feeding" massive amounts of data artificially.
This has immediate implications not only for robotic cars - what if we took a human and strapped some positional sensors, voice recording, etc. and made a humanoid robot follow him throughout the day?
I mean how varied are our lives after all? Given the right processing power and sensors, the results could be interesting...
Again, a great achievement for a 'bottom up' approach to artificial intelligence
I've no inside knowledge, but from the article it appears CMU was locked into the-same-just-more/bigger/faster strategy and the team that decamped to Stanford came up with some innovative real-time confidence-based sensor interpretation systems. It may well be that at CMU they wouldn't have been supported in this whereas at Stamford, without the established regime at CMU, they were free to do so...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Right now I think that it may have some issues regarding lane changing, and collision avoidance, but I think that, in the long run, those problems are a lot more solvable than, "Woops there's a giant ditch in the way, what do I do?".
Collision avoidance is pretty simple...Just stay X distance away from everybody around you, and computers have a huge advantage in that sort of test because, a) they don't get bored and stop paying attention, and b) they have very quick reaction time. It's probably easier to teach it to avoid someone merging into its lane than it is to teach it how to tell what a turn signal means.
Still a long way to go, but this is a big step.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Accident opportunities in the desert are minimized? "The desert" isn't just rolling sand dunes, or a dirt road through scrubby brush. It's rocky, angled, steep, unpredictable terrain. Dealing with something as easily identifiable and predictable as road traffic (cars never leap into the air, or instantly hop sideways 6 feet) is a snap compared to off-road driving. What do you do that's so complicated when you see a car changing lanes suddenly, putting it too close to you? Apply brakes? Change lanes? A computer can do those things pretty easily-- probably safer and more attentively than a person.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Incorrect. According to the website (http://www.grandchallenge.org/), the course was designed to include obstacles that had to be avoided. If I remember correctly, the obstacles included tank crosses, beams and poles, and a couple of vehicles actually got hung up on them. There was a corridor, but it was not possible to finish the course by simply relying on GPS and keeping within the middle of the road. Finally, the tunnel prevented the use of GPS.
In short, the Grand Challenge was indeed a grand challenge in that it incorporated all aspects of autonomous driving (save the road rage).
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The CMU bashing here (and subtley embedded in the wired article--everybody loves an underdog) is not really valid.
According to The Grand Challenge Tracking Site:
Stanley's official time was 6:53 and CMU's was 7:04 minutes.
I don't think that ridiculing CMU as having a "poor strategy" for doing something in an additional 11 minutes that was impossible for the entire robotics industry just a year ago is very. . . wise.
Personally, I'm overjoyed that Stanley won it. I think he's an excellent system and that Stanford deserves the praise. (Besides, those b*stards at CMU didn't let me in for my undergrad)--but making fun of their 2004 'strategy' (when they went further than any other team) and their 2005 results (when they were a scant 11 minutes behind the leader, and were 2 of only 5 teams to have a 'bot cross the finish line) seems silly to me.
And for the people wondering: Stanley is rumoured to have run linux, though last I heard the team hadn't confirmed it. In fact, most of the qualifiers for the race were running at least one linux machine.
Yeah, because things sponsored by the Department of Defense never have any value outside of wars. Like that ARPANET thing.