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)."

Comments

And this is why I don't feel comfortable

[rolfwind]

lettin a car let me drive. The article goes on to state an experience in 1991:

Everything worked perfectly until Pomerleau got to a bridge. The Humvee swerved dangerously, and he was forced to grab the wheel. It took him weeks of analyzing the data to figure out what had gone wrong: When he was "teaching" the car to drive, he had been on roads with grass alongside them. The computer had determined that this was among the most important factors in staying on the road: Keep the grass at a certain distance and all will be well. When the grass suddenly disappeared, the computer panicked.

And that bug is probably fixed by now, but the problem is, how do we determine we worked out all the bugs? We can't even do that with Linux/Windows/Anything. The closest we come to that in the OS world is a microkernel with only a few thousands lines of code and controlled input.

But how do we ever determine a program that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs is bug free? You can't and I wouldn't want to see the first literal blue screen of death when it happens.

I don't want to sound like a luddite, but the article mentions that planes have been flying autopilot (did they forget to mention landing/taking off is still done by the pilot) since the 1970s. But I believe we'll have flying cars before self-driving* cars because the problem is several hundreds of a magnitude easier in empty 3D space where all you have to do is stay high enough off the ground and avoid collisions via radar/whatnot.

*The only way is I see anything coming close to a self-driving car is on highways where lanes get marked magnetically and driving problem gets reduce to the car having to stay X feet behind the car in front of it.