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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."
To counter, I'm inventing the Automatic Finger to quickly signal my frustration at being cut-off from my parking spot.
Table-ized A.I.
We won't be handing the keys over to robot cars anytime soon
Heh.....let's work on getting cars to stop reliably before we start talking about that
Qxe4
I know it's all bobo-chis to shot amateur video and whatnot, but can a brother get some noise reduction up in here? I mean, DAMN.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I detect insecurity in your tone, human.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
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.
Now that the tire-squealing precision-skidding has been mastered, we just need the turbo boost and the annoying nasal voice synthesizer to round out the look and feel.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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 your definition of robot is "machine controlled by an intelligent computer program" then I'm sorry to say, you're ALREADY putting your faith in such things, hundreds of times per day. Hell, you're putting your life in a computer's hands on a second-by-second basis just by being within ten miles of a nuclear power plant.
Similar to a James Bond action scene, the maneuver is impressive and would be extremely difficult for a human to pull off.
Bullshit. 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. Call me when they can do what he does.
It's also extremely difficult for a human to pull off crochet if they haven't been taught how. Or to shoot a rifle and hit a target a mile away. Or fly fighter jets in formation feet apart. Yet we do that. The question is: how hard is it to train someone, and how consistently can they do it, and how much effort did it take to get the computer to do it?
The answer to the first part: Top Gear did a show segment where they had Russ Swift teach a bunch of people off the street how to do it. If I recall, they were grandmothers. They were going for a larger area, but come on- they were octogenarians.
The answer to the second part:
Apparently Stanford hasn't heard of rallying or gymkhana. Tens of thousands of people do stuff way, way more impressive than what Stanford is demonstrating- at much higher speeds in much more powerful cars. It's not hard, and the Stanford guys are grossly overexaggerating the complexity of the problem to model, as well. The whole point is that you use the car's momentum and lock wheels to make it slide predictably. Practice makes perfect for timing and aim (in the case of Top Gear, they practiced with inflatable boxes that were harmless to the cars.)
And, how many tries do you suppose it took the Stanford team to get it right?
Please help metamoderate.
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!
But where's the style? I thought it was common knowledge that the very first thing you're supposed to do after you've programmed a park to screech into a parking space is install a loudspeaker behind the grille which yells out, "heeeee-like a glove!"
... before it even happened. A few Lexus introduced the automatic parallel parking feature, and Audi responded with this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3593724097279407250#
Amusing retort. Irrelevant for 99.9%+ of people, but sold right into the person you'd love to be.
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.
In the future, not only will cars drive themselves, they will do so in the most action packed manner possible.
I'm looking for funding to put ramps and pyrotechnics all over national highways.
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.
Thanks for checking this out! To answer a few questions that have been asked:
This video actually was indeed shot the first time we put the whole system together. Of course there were other runs, both demonstrating the alternative approaches and before we had everything working properly, that didn't succeed, but the final system was pretty reliable as autonomous driving goes. That said, we'd want to test this quite a bit more before I'd be willing to lie down where those cones are, and a big issue here is that the maneuver does shred through tires pretty quickly and is pretty tough on the car in general :-).
Second, I certainly wouldn't argue that what we're doing here rivals the very best human drivers (the claim we're making is just that this is one of the more challenging _autonomous_ maneuvers that has been demonstrated). The best humans are certainly able to drive incredibly impressive stunts, and we only claim to be making progress towards this level of ability. However, it's worth noting that this particular maneuver is probably one that _most_ people would have trouble with (I know I certainly can't do it!).
Let me know if there are any other questions, and I'll do my best to clarify.
Thanks!
Zico
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.