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VW Raises the Bar for Self-Driving Vehicles
Old Man Kensey writes "According to the UK Daily Mail, VW has produced a prototype Golf (code-named "53 plus 1" in a reference to Herbie the Love Bug) that successfully steers and accelerates itself at speeds up to 150 MPH on tracks designed on the spot without pre-programming. It sounds almost too good to be true given some of the problems CMU's prototype has had over the years, but perhaps VW has learned from and extended CMU's research (and within-an-inch GPS positioning probably helps too)."
Just a note to point out the Daily Mail is roughly half a step about the National Inquirer in terms of credability, so this one could be entirely fictional.
"GPS accuracy can be improved further, to about 1 cm (half an inch) over short distances, using techniques such as Differential GPS (DGPS)." - Wikipedia
I have just read about 53+1 the other day (can't rembember where, tough) 53+1 is specialized on slalom courses and can navigate them faster than a human driver. The car first runs the course very slowly scanning it, then it has to pause for half an hour when a special software optimizes steering, braking and acceleration points and afterwards it goes around the course faster than a real driver could. The system is NOT flexible, for example when a human suddenly is on the track on the fast lap it will blissfully ignore the humans existance and accelerate right through the human and create quite a mess. The usage seems to be exactly repeatable driving for car or tyre development. Froh
It's true that academics can pursue riskier, more speculative areas of research. It's cost-effective for them to do so; they've got less overhead and grad students are cheap, and success criteria is different than for businesses -- publish a bunch of well-regarded, widely-cited papers, and you're in good shape. (you never need to earn back the investment money)
However, academics get their money from businesses and funding agencies who do have their eye on the bottom line. If an academic doesn't work on something that they feel is relevant (or abandons research they're funded to do in order to work on something cooler) then the money dries up really fast.
I've been on both sides of this (currently funder, formerly fundee) and I can tell you without doubt that academic research is a market, just like everything else.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Just for your info, planes have been landing themselves for ages. Autoland is used routinely in very low visibility conditions where it would not otherwise be legal to land the aircraft manually, unless you were using special equipment like a HUGS. If you're interested on learning more, search for Cat III autoland in Google..
Comparing a computer driving system to windows is a bad idea.
Firstly, Windows is an operating system. That means every day hundreds of brand new programs are written for it that have the possibility of screwing each other, and the system, up. If windows was only capable of running one program (Office, probably), the crash rate would go down to 1/1000000 (which, I believe, is better than human drivers)
Secondly, when windows crashes nobody DIES. Compare car-driving programs to programs that run in hospitals to monitor patients. When one of those messes up, people are put into dangerous circumstances, and as a result, they are made significantly safer.
Of course, your entire thing about 'not trusting cars that are taught' is moot
The VW prototype wasn't taught how to drive, or at least it doesn't make that assertion in the article. The 'learning cars' were prototypes developed to win contests/grant money, not be street legal.
Oh, and about Autopilot? Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the issue:
Modern autopilots generally divide a flight into taxi, take-off, ascent, level, descent, approach, landing, and taxi phases. Autopilots exist that automate all of these flight phases except the taxiing. Landing on runway and controlling the aircraft on rollout i.e keeping it on the centre of the runway is cat 3b landing, used on the majority of major runways today.
Autopilots are easily capable of taking off and landing planes.
The way I see it, you're underestimating the power of computers. Remember, in order to drive a car, the controller doesn't have to be smarter than a person.
It just has to be smarter than a 16 year old (15 in some states)
Actually - some car-based GPS systems link up to the car's other sensors (accelerometer, speed, steering, parking radar, etc). While they're not accurate for any long distance, they're perfectly good for a short distance (maybe a few hundred metres) and the software in the system can use this info in the temporary absence of a GPS signal.
I can claim to be a "rocket scientist", at least I have designed systems for satellite control and tracking, and I work for an aerospace company.
You cannot measure a position to within less than a centimeter using GPS. You can design a ranging system that gives you a measurement with enough numbers to represent that precision, but it doesn't mean that you can trust such numbers.
You cannot use GPS to give you better measurements than the accuracy of the GPS constellation orbit determination, and the satellites' positions vary more or less randomly due to residual atmosphere, solar wind, and solar radiation pressure. The end result is that GPS cannot give any reliable measurement to less than 10 cm, and one meter is closer to the best that one can accomplish in practical situations.
A more accurate system than GPS is LAGEOS, which has satellites that are much heavier and smaller than the GPS satellites. They are basically brass balls covered with mirrors. Because of that higher density, LAGEOS satellites suffer less perturbation from non-gravitational solar and atmospheric effects. However, the equipment for doing ranging with LAGEOS satellites is not portable, it's meant for geodesy studies, not navigation.
A good overview of different satellite ranging systems can be found in "Satellite Orbits", by O. Montenbruck and E. Gill, ISBN 3-540-67280-X, and here is a Wikipedia link for the most accurate satellite ranging systems.
Yes, you can. I just woke up, but I'll see if I can explain.
In the case of DGPS, the reference station uses its surveyed coordinate to difference the time encoded in the signals it is receiving against the time it would expect given an estimation of where the satellite is. So any error in the satellite's predicted position is lumped in with all the other naturally occuring forms of error.
In the case of RTK, or other forms of relative carrier phase positioning, the system attempts to determine and track the difference in the number of cycles of the carrier wave of the GPS signal between the base and the satellite and the rover and the satellite. This number multiplied by the length of the carrier wave, 19cm for L1 signals, gives you the length of one side of a triangle between the base station, the rover, and the point between the rover and satellite that is as far from the satellite as the base station is. So, the exact position of the satellite is not as important as the sight line vector the satellite forms against the base line between the base station and rover. And given the great distance of the satellite from the typical base station and rover, jitter in the satellite's position doesn't change that vector much.
In conclusion, given the advances in relative positioning, limiting factors on GPS positioning today are the accuracy of the survey points, the ability of the electronics to precisely measure the carrier phase/doppler of the GPS signal, the quality of the clock in the GPS unit and the speed/accuracy of the algorithms that determine the carrier cycle count difference.
As far as I know that requires a DPGS like system on the track with extra real time feedback to the car.
So they are cheating if you consider the real world.
I've been in a car that could drive its self on one very well surveyed road. If it got confused it would beep and assume the human was in control within a second. The internal guidance system alone cost over 1/3 of a million dollars and it used several different GPS systems to cross check the fiber gyro.
The only way cars are going to take over for driving the mini-van in place of the drive soccer mom is if there is a serious attempt to clean up the road markings. This means no more optional parking on the side as a road will either be a parking spot or a lane. Signs will need to be redone and cleaned up. The white lines must be far more precise than they are now and more places will need to deal with the yellow centerline (which has now been dropped in the EU even though its the cheapest road safety device ever)
Things have gone a long way. 2 decades ago I had a system that would indicate that a steering adjustment needed to be done. A decade ago there was Miata convertible that could maintain road position and deal with deer. This year we have a VW that can avoid traffic cones. Maybe in a decade we can see a car that can avoid the phone talking, breakfast eating SUV driver.