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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."
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 detect insecurity in your tone, human.
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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.
I'd gladly hand control of my car over to a computer if it would get me to work in half the time, and let me do other things while I "drive". And this will someday happen. Where I live, traffic slows down because of a bend in the highway. Rubbernecking causes massive jams and delays. There has to be a better way.
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.
I guess it must just come naturally then.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
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