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Another Step Towards the Driverless Car

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the optical-sensors-said-the-light-was-yellow dept.

jtogel writes "At Essex, we have for some time been working on automatically learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games, and also come up with some quite interesting, novel behaviours, which might one day make their way into commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race is now on for the real thing — we are setting up a competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge, whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer vision and AI."

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Forza 2 by jtogel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't know much about the techniques underlying Forza 2, but I went over and talked to the guys who worked on Forza 1, and we compared our approaches. At least for the first game, what they are actually using is recorded trajectories on different track segments which are then spliced together at the junctions of segments, so as to create similar-looking behaviours on unseen tracks. The problem here is of course that the new tracks are constrained to being constructed out of the same segments as the driver has already been tested on - there is no generalization. The track designers for Forza simply had to live with this constraint.

    We have ourselves gotten player modelling working fine with evolutionary neural networks, which can generalize, but the Forza team didn't consider these techniques reliable and fast enough in time for the release of the original game. Maybe things have changed with Forza 2.

    There is some information on the Forza AI on http://research.microsoft.com/mlp/forza/, and our approach to modelling is described in http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2006Making.pdf.

    Note that all this is about modelling behaviour, not about creating new behaviour from scratch; there are some papers on this on my website as well.

  2. Safety vs. Freedom , again. by Original+Replica · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Make it either Opt-In or by Court Order

    Now this, to me, is a very important distiction. What if for this to work well, all the cars have to be computer controlled? What if computer control is then mandated? This is a whole new exciting level of "nanny government". Sure this might be safer in that there would be fewer auto accidents, but do you really want all transportation to be centrally controlled? Sure each car might be autonomous at first, but emergency workers need the ability to remotely turn on off, right? It's for everyone's safety.

    --
    We are all just people.
  3. The problem isn't in the technology by RandomWordGenerator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem with driverless cars isn't the technology but insurance.
    Many manufacturers have been dissuaded from pursuing the technology and installing in their vehicles because in the case of any accident the corporation would be liable. Obviously the 'driver' wouldn't be at fault because they wouldn't be driving.
    No large corporation is going to put itself in line to pay out on every bump, scrape and minor slaying caused when their killer robo-cars Attack!