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Stanford Robot Car Capable of Slide Parking
kkleiner writes "Stanford's Junior, the robot car that took second place at DARPA's Grand Challenge in 2007, has learned how to perform a tire-squealing 180-degree spin into a skin-tight parking space. Similar to a James Bond action scene, the maneuver is impressive and would be extremely difficult for a human to pull off. We won't be handing the keys over to robot cars anytime soon, but Stanford shows us that at least for some driving tasks robot cars can already meet or even exceed human ability."
Do notice all the tire tracks that don't lead into the parking spot? Like all of the robotics projects I've been involved in, this took a LOT of tries.
If a robot does exactly what it is programmed to do, is that autonomy? Is sounds like they programmed it to perform this maneuver (going backward at a decent speed and sliding into a specific zone), and then it did (after several failures apparently).
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
c'mon, if a robot car took your park using the awesome sliding maneuver, you'd have to give it the thumbs up.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
3. That would be a disaster for pretty much any human attempting that sort of maneuver. I'd probably still put my faith in robots.
To put one's faith in a robot, is to put one's faith in the [ability/morality etc of the] human(s) who designed said robot.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Well, except for the part that you very likely could have killed yourself and two other people, possibly more. You were extremely lucky, as 99 times out of 100, when you lose control of your car while swerving, EXTREMELY bad things happen. The fact that this once it didn't doesn't make this an awesome story, it makes it a bit of a sad one to hear that your stupidity was rewarded.
What you did shouldn't be glorified. These maneuvers are exciting to watch on television and in the movies when performed by professionals with years of training and under extremely controlled conditions (and, incidentally, medical personnel immediately ready in case of accidents, some of which have killed even those professionals). But frankly, it sounds to me like the guy who was pissed off wasn't the asshole. I would have been pissed off too, and would have rather taken the damn bus than ride with you again. Maybe after two or three people you know are killed in car wrecks, you'll look back on this story and "awesome" will no longer be the word you use to describe it.
Seriously. I feel like you're saying, "I played Russian Roulette with FIVE bullets loaded in the gun, and I won! It was awesome!" No, it wasn't awesome. You were a dumbass.
If one parks a car this way, is it possible to un-park it?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'll get the car into the tight spot - call me when the car can autonomously find a parking spot.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Yeah, he's one of the best- but he's doing that in a 500hp AWD car, not a 100HP FWD diesel station wagon, at speeds several times higher than what Stanford was doing.
It's a hell of a lot easier to pull off maneuvers like that in a powerful, lightweight, AWD car set up for sliding than it is in a family wagon....
Do you know anything about control theory? At all? It certainly doesn't sound like it. They're not just programming the car what to do and when, the car sees where the cones are and works it out for itself.
Why is this modded informative? This should be modded troll.
"2. Parking like this is stupid and wears down the tires unevenly and too fast."
Obviously the point isn't that this is an efficient parking method, it's that it's a fucking awesome method that's being performed by a ROBOT. Of course you can't do this on problematic conditions, that ain't the fucking point in the first place.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Most nuclear power plants have containment buildings around their reactors, that keep anything bad from happening to anyone even if the reactors were to blow up. Newer ones also have reactor designs which the laws of physics prevent from blowing up, no matter what the controller does.
But hey, keep on scaremongering, so we can keep on enjoying breathing coal ash.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So, about 0.011% of the population died from a car accident last year. Whoop-tee doo. It's totally crazy fucking dangerous, Mr. Little! It's inevitable: you're going to die.
In 2001, 0.001% of the US population died in terrorist attacks. In the past 10 years, 0.0001% of the population has died annually from terrorist attacks. This has motivated $1T wars in middle east ($30k per capita), $7B annual spending on TSA ($20 per capita per annum), and a national campaign of fear. Proportional to the risk, we should be spending somewhere around $100T/year on highway safety and law enforcement. Instead, CHP has a budget of $2B, and national spending is less than $100B.
So, either we need to increase highway safety enforcement about 1000-fold (which should easily buy us each our own robot controlled car), or we should reduce war-on-terrorism spending by 1000 fold
Wow, way to miss point and be an idiot at the same time.
You must get really pissed off when people show off their computer programs that do natural language processing. I mean a 6 year old do better, and we manage to teach almost anyone to do it without difficulty much better than the stupid computer can.
Or their little robots doing stuff with video recognition in order to recognize and move blocks around - I mean toddlers can do that!
We don't need fancy robots; we need better driver training. In the US, you demonstrate basic proficiency in skills that matter 95% of the time when everything is going swimmingly, answer a very limited subset of the rules/laws of the road, and then get handed your license, and never need to do any of that again. Why are we shocked when people then miserably fail when the shit hits the fan? In other countries, you have to learn and demonstrate actual car handling skills, like recovering from a skid...and people routinely fail the driving tests on the first try, because it's actually difficult.
I think in most states you need more training to own a firearm than you do to be handed the keys to 2 tons of metal that causes 40,000 deaths a year. The culture here is so poor that people use the term "accident" to describe collisions.
We also need laws that make it criminal negligence if you distract yourself to the point of not controlling your vehicle properly and cause a collision.
Please help metamoderate.
Sir;
Thank you for building the future. It looks neat.
Respectfully yours,
The present.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256