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Carnegie Mellon Wins Urban Challenge
ThinkingInBinary writes "The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order."
Congrats to the winners and all the other contestants!
Go Gators!
a nice link to Wired blog entries (from the darpa site) http://blog.wired.com/defense/urban_challenge/index.html
2nd is the best
Was the tartan team wearing kilts?
Oh, and does it run on Volkswagon?
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I, for one, welcome our urban robotic overlords.
I was really bummed when I learned Stanford beat us by a few minutes, but apparently the scoring worked out in our favor. I got to sit in on several of the Tartan Racing meetings, and the technology they came up with was fascinating.
Congrats to all the winners! Tons of hard work I'm sure and some impressive results! I'm going to enjoy reading all the postmortems and such. This research really interests me. I love all the creative use of algorithms and technology. Again, congrats and well done!
So these guys get some millions from public funding and does the public get any opensource out of it ?
MIT, MIT...
Oh yeah, isn't that kind of like Massachusetts' version of CMU?
While the immediate winners of the race are the three teams holding checks, as well as the military which gets to pick from a field of highly successful new technology, the real beneficiaries will be the drivers of the world. I believe the importance of this hasn't quite filtered into most people's minds.
Many people know that more than 40,000 people die each year in motor vehicle accidents, however when it comes to people I feel this number is insufficient. "More than 40,000 people" have been dying each year now for more than a decade, and that's only in the US. Since I was 17 more than four hundred thousand people have died participating in an activity that machines can now do flawlessly (if very slowly). This blows my mind.
Worldwide, 1.2 million people die on the roads every year and the repercussions of these deaths on families and friends can be unusually devastating due to their sudden, unexpected nature.
The performance of these three teams is akin to three major pharmaceuticals all announcing they have come up with a cure for one of the major cancers. That, surely, would have been worldwide front-page news.
Now, of course, the real debate begins. How much more will consumers be willing to pay for safe vehicles, and what limitations on speed will they accept? Rolling out this technology (if you'll excuse the play on words) will require changes in infrastructure, law, and cultural mentality. Especially here in the states. If it means saving this many lives, will you pay twice as much and drive at half speed, at least for a little while?
How far this technology has come in just a few years is (ridiculously) amazing. Major kudos to everyone who's brought this so far!
I only wish that one of the conditions of winning was to release the software that powered your car - can you imagine how much farther things would have come if everyone could build on the previous years' winners? So much brilliant coding has gone into this, but so much of it is just reinventing the wheel. (...Ouch.) But in all honesty, the state of the art would progress gigantically if one of the winners would GPL their car-driving software.
Although I was hoping that Team OshKosh would finish the race... too bad but a truck that could navigate urban areas effectively would be more beneficial to the military, but on second thought I dont want our house to be @#$$@@NOCARRIER##$@#
:P, I'm quite impressed that they got the urban challenge the first time (no take two)
they should just tweak the truck to use the winner's technology
Actually, according to the Wired blog, MIT came in fourth, although the other teams were not mentioned.
Nothing at all in that summary tells me what the Urban Challenge is; nothing in ANY of the links tells me concisely what it is, either; Wiki eventually did. How hard would it be to include "a prize competition for driverless cars" in the first sentence of that article?
Are y'all experimenting with automated posting or something, because that at least would make sense.
Triv
It's kind of interesting how much effort has gone in to building a robot that can drive in (error-prone) human traffic. If, on the other hand, *every* car was automated, it would be so much easier to implement. (Controls built into the road, maybe, and of course less need to handle wildly out-of-control cars; plus benefits like optimized freeways (anyone remember "Blue Thunder"'s freeway?) and intelligent intersections that talk to incoming cars, etc.) I think the eventual progression is to automated and efficient public transportation, where no one owns their own car, nor needs to. Did anybody consider, back in the day, if one car per person/family was actually a good idea?
Ha! In the USA? People here are usually glad to pay ridiculous prices for things that are otherwise free or far less costly (I'm thinking bottled water and cars that aren't gas guzzlers). But that is a stretch even for Americans. And lets face it, saving lives generally doesn't make it to the top of most people's lists of Important Things.
It amazes me that Virginia Tech is right up there with Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. I'm happy to say that I'm going to get to go there (after two years of community college, yielding me a guaranteed transfer - as long as I get a 3.0 GPA in CC)...
Rirelobql xabjf gung EBG-13 vf gur yrnfg frpher rapelcgvba rire, ohg jbhyq lbh jnfgr lbhe gvzr npghnyyl qrpelcgvat vg???
Why do so many geeks appear to be more at home in soviet russia than in the free world?
What gives you the right to decide who can and can't have a car?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Driving is a privilage, not a right.
I don't think its about that per se. It's about finding and implementing the most efficient transportation mechanism. If you could develop a fully automated system, you wouldn't need to own cars since they could be available on demand. How many hours are cars driven vs garaged, one could reduce the total number of automobiles by a factor of 5 if not more.
I remember seeing an article on here a while ago about mass transit that went to each neighborhood but instead of trains were 4 passenger vehicles that were fully automated.
It is already starting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkEu-PdVlK0 for a video of the new Lexus self park. The market will determine what people are willing to pay. If I would have asked you 20 years ago if you wanted an automatic door lock/unlock, location, directions and other GPS related services, phone, crash detection and emergency contact after airbag deployment, and much more via a satellite connection in your car. You would have said it would cost a fortune.... now it is $16USA a month. The nature of the progress of technology it this field and others will shape the world for generations to come. Now where is my hover-car and house cleaning robot?
The real question is, where is the $2000 car? While it's great that all these amenities are being added to cars, some of us don't really care about all these extra features, and just want a cheap car that gets them from point A to point B. Even the cheaper cars seem to come with a lot of extras that aren't really needed. While I realize there are a lot of costs such as materials, labor, and design that go into designing cars, I wish that some company would just try to make a car that was really cheap.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
People like owning cars (and other things). There's a reason. It's related to this 'freedom' concept that I'm so big on. In fact, there's a whole school of thought that suggests that freedom is not possible without property. Somehow, this is counter-intuitive to some.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I thought true freedom came only when you had nothing to tie you down?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
... suicide car bombers.
Oh, let's see - maybe the fact that I have to share the roads with dangerous drivers?
We limit the rights of some to protect the rights of all - if you are an unsafe driver, I will happily limit your right to drive if it increases the rights of the majority to drive safely.
That, my snide friend, is what gives me the right - the same right that pretty much all of the laws of the US are based on. Also the same reason you have to take a driving test and maintain a driver's license. Yes, that's right, a license to drive. Pretty "Soviet", eh? In your view, is it only American if we just let everyone jump behind the wheel, even the blind and insane, because "America, Fuck Yeah!"?
I'm sorry, but think before you post. It enriches us all.
I almost laughed out loud when I saw pictures of MIT's pimped out Land Rover. Besides the numerous external sensors and other gear mounted on the vehicle, I read that there is so much internal equipment to manage everything that they had real heating issues that were solved by installing an additional air conditioner and a power generator to power the AC. This is what happens when you give some money and parts to a bunch of bright geeks with too much time.
Here.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Most freedoms are privileges (from a pure survival standpoint I mean), yet we've made them rights because we feel they make for a better society overall. Be VERY careful whenever you want to clamp down on something we've had choice in for quite a long time.
Orson Scott Card recently wrote a great article on the whole "world without cars" thing. I really like his ideas about when you do and don't need a car.
Having worked in the business (and competition) of automating vehicles for some time now, here's a list of our biggest challenges:
1. You can coordinate 100 vehicles with a serious piece of hardware. Coordinating 10000 would be unthinkable with current algorithms and hardware.
2. You can make a car stay on the road, but you can't make a road engineer get the map data right, current, repaired, expanded, with sidewalk curbs, or (especially) published.
3. You can detect small children in the road but you can't detect pot holes the size of a small child.
4. The clothoid math is killer for people and computers.
You can't drive subway cars either.
I would be interested to know exactly what the scores where and how they were derived. From reading the Popular Mechanics (blog) and Register (blog) reports, it sounds like Stanford might have gotten a bit of the raw end of the stick.
Specifically, the Register is reporting that it DARPA counted the up to 20min Stanford's car was stuck sandwiched between two other cars due to Cornell's robot screwing up against it, and Popular Mechanics is reporting that DARPA says Stanford lost to Carnegie Mellon by about 20min.
Sounds like it would have been a extremely close race if DARPA had been applying more reasonable (from the principle of trying to eliminate luck as a large factor) accounting principles.
Or you could, you know, decide for yourself if you want to share cars like this. I happen to not care what car I'm driving as long as it moves, and if I could get a car that drives itself cheaper than paying for a car, I think I could handle not actually owning one. (not to mention that I prefer to walk, so having a car isn't very useful for me most of the time)
Firstly, a car you can't ever drive would never sell in the US. People want control, they want the ability to drive off-road even if they never actually do (see SUVs), and they love their older cars too much to stop driving them. Secondly, even if every car was automated, that would only take care of a *few* of the problems faced by automated vehicles. They would still have to deal with all of the problems that are caused by things other than unpredictable drivers, such as: wind, rain, snow, ice, fog, loss of GPS, worn or obscured road markings, people walking in the road, things that fall from trucks on the freeway, tires that blow out, malfunctioning traffic signals, downed power lines, mechanical failures of all kinds, collapsed bridges, avalanches, sinkholes, people trying to trick the robot sensors, and all the other problems I didn't happen to think of just now. If you really want your robotic car to be 100% safe, you have to program it to handle so many varied situations that I believe programming it with traffic rules for safe driving around humans would be a relatively small part of your work.
Now it's true that you could drive more efficiently without humans, but that will have to be phased in gradually. For example, you could have special robot lanes, and perhaps eventually entire robot-only streets in big cities. But that would only be possible *after* the introduction of autonomous vehicles.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
You're exaggerating, in the extreme.
I'm willing to bet every (human) driver in this country would have succeeded with flying colors on this course as well. In fact the odds of a driver getting killed in an accident any specific day are extremely slim, and they'd be much smaller still, if you restrict that to low-speed driving, during the day, etc., etc.
The skill of these robotic drivers can only be determined with any reasonable accuracy after they have driven many MILLIONS of miles. Only then can you say they are, on average, safer than human drivers. And even then, it would still be insanely ridiculous to claim they drive flawlessly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Freedom != Anarchy
Property is an absolute necessity, second only to life. If I can't stop someone from taking the clothes off my back, and food from my mouth, I'm seriously restricted in my own freedom.
The same goes for your own life. You aren't free if anyone can just kill you, yet others aren't 'free' if they are prevented from killing you.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How about a Kia Rio for $11.5K? They actually include "Body-color Exterior Door Handles" in the list of amenities, so I don't think it could be stripped down much more. It's still more than $2k, but even a raw ton of steel plate costs $800, so I don't think a $2000 car will happen. You can't blame it all on features, engines and transmissions do cost money too.
Not that I'm biased or anything ;)
...when major players on the Auto Industry worked jointly with them and they weren't mentioned, unless one actually checks out the team bios?
Having the cutest team member!
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/TeamAnnieway.asp
Even the number of Americans killed in World War II is only 1 decade of auto deaths!
Well yeah, we did wait until you guys got tired to join in.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Autonomous vehicle tech is needed for ultra low carbon emission vehicles. Slow vehicles need autonomous abilities because simple labor cost economics require it.
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This is another take on why the DARPA autonomous vehicle development is important.
It is relatively easy and feasible to build a 2 to 10 mile per hour freight vehicle that is "green" or ultra low carbon emissions, (compared to building a vehicle with 50 to 65 miles per hour speed ability).
But when the average speed of a vehicle drops below 35 miles per hour, then the labor cost of the driver operating the vehicle exceeds the non-labor operating cost of the vehicle.
I can envision existing trucks refitted with a 1500 watt solar roof (that's only 1.5 horsepower now), with some batteries, maybe electric braking and boost technology, with the existing engine and tranny left in place, about 100 watts of computer power. It could haul a load maybe at 1 to 10 miles per hour with maybe 1/5th or 1/3 the carbon emissions. There is no money to pay a driver to sit around and play cards in the cab while this puppy ambles down interstate 5.
Autonomous vehicle technology also could serve for "meals on wheels" and grocery delivery and rural mail delivery solutions. This entire class of solutions is dominated by labor costs that easily exceed the delivery vehicle operating costs.
Remember the Erie Canal? That was a slow and low energy transportation solution, autonomous vehicles can change the equilibrium and allow some of those solutions to start up again.
She is cute! AND a nerdy type geek to boot!
Maybe not quite in Kari Byron's class(of Mythbusters fame), http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.tvsquad.com/media/2006/05/mythbuster-kari.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.tvsquad.com/category/mythbusters/&h=253&w=250&sz=20&tbnid=r8mZbMBJ-dwMMM:&tbnh=111&tbnw=110&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkari%252Bmythbusters%26um%3D1&start=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=1
but still cute and geeky in her own right.
I would have given you a +1 informative for bringing her to our attention, not offtopic!
Note to the modders...get out of yer mom's basement!
Offtopic...sheesh!
Hell, I'd pay to see this chick and Kari wrestling nude...in hot grits!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Then where does anarchy stop and freedom begin? When it comes to people moving tons of metal at dangerous speeds while only caring about how fast they can get somewhere?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is only the beginning of the new world order. Imagine unmanned robotic vehicles prowling the streets in Iraq, Iran, and...hmmm...even New York? With enough firepower, these vehicles could control all movement of citizens within any of these locales. Seems like a necessary step to either control the streets of some oil-producing nation indefinitely, or for implementing a military coup of some random Democracy.
Have you seen the challenge? "partially worn or obscured road markings"? They had dirt tracks marked only by two piles of dirt on the sides and only two out of 11 cars had trouble with them (namely Carolo and MIT's car, while Carolo hit those dirt piles MIT just slowed to a crawl), the rest drove like it was a regular road. I bet in the following years DARPA will include simulations of desaster conditions and I bet some cars will still make it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm sure it's possible to build something that can move and carry passengers for 2k$ but I doubt it'd go very fast or have many survivors after an accident.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Oh gee! Thats awful. Good thing we have your wisdom to point this out for us!
Half speed?
If you calculate the average speed in a traffic jam during the rush hour - hell, average it with a freeway while you're at it - you get half speed or worse.
That's why the automated public transport idea is so great.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This is just silly. Just because there is a communication network, and a protocol does not mean that there needs to be a single point of failure. Cars can even test that the other cars are following the correct protocols, and are in proper communication. There would always be problems with loan psychotics vehicles, but people drive into market places, and drive drunk all the time.
Comments like this make me realize that South Korea will probably be the first place that has computer controlled vehicles, because they have one government composed of 7 companies that provide almost everything (insurance, banking, cars, telecom, gas, etc...). OK maybe the Japanese will do it.
Transition is the key issue. If we were to redesign the transportation system again given the current state of knowledge and technology, it would probably be vastly different than the system that is currently in place. However, there already is a system in place which is crucial for every aspect of our lives. So a feasible transition plan will have to be central in any new technology.
In 1986, there was the Yugo GV for $3990. You've seen a ton of them still on the road, because even though they were cheap, they lasted a long time.
The Kia Rio was $6995 in 2000. The price has gone up, but I believe it is a lot more solid now.
C'mon, Honda's smallest scooters run $2000. A brand new ATV will run $2800 min.
It's not the features that cost money, it's the safety, labor, and materials. Long gone are the days, you could design a box on wheels and get Adolf Hitler to back you.
Similar tech is in use daily on large farms, but it is a rigidly defined route. Self steering tractors are very common now, there are even kits you can get that bolt on to your normal tractor. They are more intended for keeping precise plowing/tilling/planting etc spacing, where inches count highly, but using GPS and maps of the fields they work perfectly fine. If there was a dedicated lane next to existing freeways for slow and steady cargo delivery-separating human drivers from the bot drivers- this could be done today fairly easily I think using similar off the shelf stuff. The darpa challenge is way more about building autonomous robotic fighting vehicles/ military convoy vehicles (Read the oshkosh terramax site, why they are using that large truck in their efforts, it is a direct sales model if they can get it to work right, as they didn't this test), and as such needs to be loads more complicated than just following a wide and clear road with traffic all flowing the same direction, etc. One of the larger problems is off the wall events that can't be adequately programmed for in advance and have to rely on sensors, like the random deer out in the road, people running across the highway, "road gators" and other unexpected trash in the road, stuff like that. In a military situation, perhaps they wouldn't bother, smash their way through, but still try to not run over all the locals during the trip.
I think it is going to be really hard to come up with a civilian model that would work on all roads, just too many variables to contend with. In a war situation they can afford to be a little more sloppy in the collateral damage department (from their point of view, not the other guys of course). They want to pull expensive humans out of the mix as much as possible, while still retaining near the same level functionality. On a civilian road during non war conditions, the quality of the self steering needs to be loads better.
Because I didn't have time to scan every team's website and list all of the sponsors. (Of course, it didn't make a difference, as Slashdot sat on the story for over 12 hours, instead of releasing it soon after the results were announced.) Then we reach the problem with GNU/Linux: we get "Carnegie Mellon and General Motors and Caterpillar and Intel and Google and Applanix and Tele Atlas and Castle Commerce Center and Vector and Ibeo and Mobileye and NetApp and CarSim Mechanical Simulation and Hewlett Packard and Clean Power Resources and Macom and Viewpoint Production Services and McCabe Software's Tartan Racing Team". I assume you just meant I should include GM, but then who gets included and who doesn't? I figure, each team that won came from a university, so I'll list those, and you can go to the team websites to find out more.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
40K only sounds like a staggering number because you haven't put it into any context.
The government pegs the number of vehicles in the US at more than 243 million (only about 2.5m are large commercial vehicles -- multi-axle trucks). The NHTSA's 2001 statistics say 90% of Americans drive to work... that's more than 250 million people.
When you consider that a quarter billion Americans spend anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours driving every single day of every year, 40K starts to look like a rather small number.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Well-said. You can't even buy a new motorcycle for $2K.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
My bigger gripe with the "nobody has to own a car" system proposed above is that there will be tracking. Any sort of system, be it of the Soviet Russia or Anarcho-Capitalism flavor will eventually try to achieve some kind of a panopticon - either to "prevent dissidents" or to "prevent shareholder loss".
Well, ya, but they obviously don't go everywhere either and they have other limitations as well. They are good for huge bulk cargoes going to and from very limited areas, after that, delivery is still by road in most cases, that's the focus here. Very few homes or businesses are on a direct rail terminal. There's no perfect solution when it comes to getting people or goods from point A to B, we need the whole mix of technologies that you see now to accomplish this. And besides that, this discussion and thread and Darpa challenge event from the article is about automating road transport, not the railroads, not airplanes, not ships, the roads and road vehicles, ie, cars and trucks, a very important part of our total transportation stack. I was just pointing out that off road at least, the tech exists for automatic hands-off steering following very precise tracks and is already in fairly widespread use and is expanding greatly as we speak. I then speculated that a dedicated normal roadway or dedicated lane might be useful sometime soon to use this tech, because it's here already, with some limitations, but based on the darpa entrants advances, I expect this to get pretty good soon, not enough for stop and go city driving in non warfare situations, but perhaps for semis on the freeway in some places. Maybe. Most likely it is possible now, GPS has really opened this up a lot. Not saying it is a good idea, but engineering wise it seems pretty close to doable. Combine it with lane maintaining proximity radar-on some luxury cars now last I knew, or developed anyway, and it fits pretty close to all that is required outside of a few more emergency oriented safety tweaks, the road hazard avoidance issues and so on I mentioned.
So yes, it can be overstated. Look back, with the exception of Volvo (when it was a Swedish company) auto companies have not done well selling safety. Indeed, it hurt Ford Motor Company when they implemented many safety features of their own volition. The fatality rate then was much higher in nearly every way: absolute, total population, number of cars and the average distance driven. People do not like to be reminded of their fallibility. Right now, let it get pushed, for perhaps the wrong reasons, but quietly. Hence, eventually it can have the utility you desire. Until then it like the Pharmaceutical Companies, it would be hype.
On the contrary, freedom -> anarchy. It's stronger, though--freedom actually implies anomie, not just anarchy.
If I am prevented from enslaving you, I am not free. Note that this does disrupt the nice, convenient association between "freedom" and "good".
In one of the links I read, I think from a U.K. site or publication, mention was made of how easily the optical recognition software could be fooled by a blue car against a blue background. I am wondering if I saw another problem today where the computerized vehicles might do better than one that is human controlled.
About one to two times a week in the Burbs I stop at a store in a low traffic area relatively early in the morning. Upon exiting their parking I cross a lightly trafficked internal road into another lot in an area behind other stores. The purpose is to lessen the number of stop signs I run through. I drive through at a rough diagonal. The lot is usually nearly completely empty, however, many times near to the point of exit there is a vehicle parked. Today due to the angle of the sun the reflection on the windshield made it impossible to view that area. It was impossible for me to have seen any vehicle (or anything else) in the shaded area.
Perhaps a radar equipped vehicle could have been unfazed by the lighting. However, I wonder how these vehicles will handle night time driving. The worse is encountering another vehicle coming over a hill where the lights shine directly into the eyes of the driver and the side of the road is invisible. Will they do better or worse than we?
Someone recorded the webcast of the finals: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3873219/DARPA_Urban_Challenge_Final_Event
I'm sure Joseph and Carl are right on board with you! Why is it that every crackpot in America wants to save us from something?
Stinkin' liberals want to "save" us from fatty foods and the tyranny of owning property and personal responsibility. Funny how they never see they hypocrisy of holding that a 13-year-old has the right to major surgery without informing anyone but the ACLU, but law abiding citizens had better not own the means to protect themselves from criminals. Right on, Hilly!
Damn conservatives are worse: "save" citizens' freedom by monitoring their phone calls, recording their movements, and imprisoning and torturing ones who resist. There's no hypocrisy in claiming to be "compassionate" and then starting a war that's killed tens of thousands of civilians. You go, George!
The only solution is to find a Bernadotte. Too bad there's a shortage.
The first problem with that solution is that some people seem to be compelled to vandalize things if nobody's watching. A camera doesn't seem to count. (Well, actually the camera *IS* the first thing vandalized, so I suppose it DOES count, but not in a useful manner.)
Some societies handle this better than others, but I believe that all have a problem with this. (The US appears to me to average worse than Japan...but I never worked for a transportation company in Japan.) The amount of graffiti is probably a reasonable estimator...but vehicles travel, so something that gets defaced in one part of town will end up in another...which means that you can't have vandals ANYWHERE.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, the last time I checked you didn't need a driver's license in North Dakota. I think that was the only state that didn't require it.
(IIRC, if you don't require drivers licenses, the Feds won't put in any Interstate Highways...but North Dakota wouldn't get one anyway...so they didn't bother. If you didn't cap your speed limit, the Feds wouldn't but in any Interstate Highways...but...)
OTOH, do remember that North Dakota is a largely rural state with a low population. Things that make sense in urban settings don't make any sense there. One size does NOT fit all.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm not sure exactly what you're implying, that if we converted over to automated driving systems, driving deaths would disappear? That seems irrationally hopeful. Especially if some of our more popular software companies had anything to do with the systems controlling vehicles. It would bring all new meaning to the term, "blue screen of death" and "crash."
Come on, surely you are capable of deeper thought than this
Freedom is a duty, not a right. It is a duty to use violence to protect others when people interfere with their freedom. Only this can guarantee your own freedom. So stealing is obviously in opposition with freedom, while ownership is not.
So you see freedom is in fact a very, very "restrictive" law. It forces your hand in many situations to do something. Without these actions however, that are now mostly taken for granted, there would be no freedom. If you think that there is freedom in a lawless region, just go to somalia. There is nothing even remotely resembling law in that country currently. Nobody will come after you if you steal, nobody guards the sees, and things like banks hire their own thugs. Why don't you go over and see just how "free" you are in Mogadishu.
Those bots weren't following the road markings, they were following the invisible GPS waypoints DARPA provided, which were much more detailed and accurate than you'd find in any car navigation system today. At best, their road-finding algorithms were fixing the last meter of inaccuracy in their differential GPS. And did you actually watch the bots as they traversed that section? I don't think any of them went over 10 MPH with frequent braking. Even CMU looked quite sluggish. A person could easily do 20-30 over such a flat and well-defined road, and that's not even in a race.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The race is important, but not in the way you claimed.
Intelligent vehicle research has been going on for years, and the US Dept. of Transportation funded autonomous vehicle research years ago that culminated in a vehicle that drove 97% of the way across the US using autonomous road following. There is a lot more to do, but many of the outstanding are legal, related to liability and infrastructure (as noted). (Reserved lanes for robot cars? Who takes the blame when one crashes?)
This challenge encouraged and accelerated ongoing research, but I bet the effects on road fatalities are very small for a long time. More immediate effects will be on urban combat and luxury vehicles, and on the development of interesting component technologies. There are pictures and a few cost figures at this site, and a
forum for
participants here
Well, if that 40K is avoidable, then it certainly is a staggering number.
257 million people driving to work and home 180 days each year is 92.5 BILLION trips per year.
That gives you only a 1 in 2,312,500 chance of being one of those fatalities.
Or put another way, a staggeringly-small 0.000043% vehicular trips results in a fatality.
And that's purely based on the NHTSA's "drive to work" figure. It doesn't include going to the store, vacation travel, heading to the beach on the weekend, etc.
Hell, it's probably safer than the oft-quoted airline safety figures.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
If it wasn't for MIT, the end of the race would have been boring. You could actually see MIT's car thinking. I heard that they never tested it in the desert because it was an 'Urban' challenge and that it made it's way through that one desert road by thinking it out on it's own for the first time. You could have put that thing anywhere and it would have completed it's mission. Carnegie and Standford have been driving in the desert for years and MIT has just began then months ago. Those hesitations here and there could be tweaked out in no time. I hope that they enter the next race.
Anarchy is the opposite of hierarchy. Think about it. Can you truly be free when a hierarchy forces you into a category?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I think the eventual progression is to automated and efficient public transportation, where no one owns their own car, nor needs to.
...and no one can use it to go any real distance without the government knowing where they've been.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York DNF
Out of race at 9 miles; when pause applied, rolled up against a guard rail; when unpaused, could not back away from rail since it had no functional backing software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
Well, didn't see that comment anywhere else, particularly with the paranoid spin. It's hard to believe that everyone saw that angle instantly. It's easy to get excited about the positive potentials of new technologies, and forget the nefarious uses to which almost every new advancement in technology has been put.
... which, they are. All of us. All the time. What do your Libertarian leanings have to say about that?
And I'm not paranoid if they actually are watching me
Driving is a privilage, not a right.
This mantra is repeated all the time, but I can tell you from people who live in the suburbs that do not drive in the US in 2007 -- well they are essentially handicapped.
I don't want to drive. I would rather teleport or be driven around with other people so that I could socialize with them while traveling, or I would like to have a driver on my staff drive me to work in my limo.
Driving is basically a necessity. Not a privilege, nor a right.
Why does the government spend so much time on infrastructure and regulations for driving? Do they go out of their way for my other priviledges?
To put it in perspective, the government does other things like provide a police force and fire department. They also provide sanitation and sewer. Are all of these things priveledges too?
Well, no. I just think you've seen a few too many cheesy movies.
Didn't look, but I spent all day today working on a truck with pretty much the same equipment. IE RTK GPS, laser distance finders, radar imaging, resolvers, servo controlled steering, and brakes, dozens of networks...
Every day, its called a job in design.
Amazing that of all the machines I have worked on, of them maybe 1/4 of them that were sold, not a single one was sold for a profit. Yet the company is making record profits. Maybe thats because I only work on prototypes that don't have to make a profit on their own, now the production versions do.
This mantra is repeated all the time, but I can tell you from people who live in the suburbs that do not drive in the US in 2007 -- well they are essentially handicapped.
I live in one of said suburbs and I am very familiar with how frustrating it is to be without a car. My husband could not get a US driver's license for an extended period of time after he moved here (because of new laws requiring him to first have a social security number and this and that and blah blah blah...). It is extremely difficult to get around without a car when there are no sidewalks and few bus routes. You need to plan hours or the whole day for what would normally be a short trip. (One of my coworkers has a depth perception problem and cannot drive. She walks back and forth to work--1 hour in good weather, 1.5 hours in snow. She tried taking the bus, but that took longer and involved almost as much walking.)
That said... Owning a car and driving a car is still a privilege. People certainly can and do get by without them, and anyone who cannot use one responsibly _shouldn't_ be allowed to drive one. Just like I don't hand guns to 5 year olds, I don't let them drive either.
Everything else you mentioned is done to benefit society as a whole. Whether or not a single person can own/drive a car cannot be compared to a community banding together to meet reasonable needs as far as hygiene, crime, and protection of the community against fire goes. If you were arguing that transportation (of people, products, etc.) was a necessity (for both individuals and communities), then I'd agree, but making the jump to "It must be by personally owned and driven car" moves it into the realm of privilege.
Because geeks -- computer geeks, anyway -- tend to be of an engineering mindset, rather than an analyst mindset. Hence, you have the distinction between the beliefs in engineering and spontaneous order: a distinction between the beliefs in pre-planning and proaction to a successful outcome, and a successful outcome arising purely reactively through the interactions between multiple agents. Engineering versus emergent behavior.
Free-market economics professor Russell Roberts wrote a good piece on the difference.
Anyway, that's one answer. Another answer is simpler: Slashdot's largest demographic segment is 18-24 year-old males, i.e. college-age geeks. It's pretty much a given that if somebody is in college, their beliefs turn leftist for a while; the arrogant notion that they know it all means they favor ideologies which proclaim success through knowing all a priori, as Soviet socialism did.
The poverty of that view has long since been demonstrated. In spite of the massive computing might possessed by the likes of IBM, Google, the NSA, and so forth, mankind is still quite a ways away from having amassed nearly enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge and ability to process it all such that the sort of engineering-driven, planned society and economy can possibly succeed.
Oh, I should include as a classic example the various hedge funds out there. They hire brilliant quantitative analysts to work on risk models that require grid computing clusters to calculate. The result? The current, massive sub-prime mortgage meltdown we are seeing.
See also the book titled When Genius Failed, about the failure of Long-Term Capital Management -- a hedge fund that failed 10 years ago for much the same reason those today are failing: lack of sufficient knowledge and predictive capability, i.e., a lack of engineering skill. Nevermind the existence of 2 economics Nobel Laureates on their team, including one (Myron Scholes) partially-responsible for the Black-Scholes formula now considered the defacto standard in risk-pricing...
Geeks appear more at home in Soviet Russia because they have the arrogance to believe they can outsmart tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people. So have the people involved in the above-named organizations...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?