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China Catches Up With Google's Driverless Car
mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A driverless car navigated 286km of expressway all on its own. Using nothing but a pair of video cameras and laser rangefinders, i.e. no GPS, it managed to arrive safely even through fog. The computer vision based approach means that at the moment it can only drive during daylight hours. Google might need to speed up ..."
Apparently they already have driverless high-speed trains.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Automatically driving a car isn't easy per se, but it's not anywhere near the hardest AI problems we have. In particular, if we were to take a realistic bar for safety--- beating the average human driver--- the bar is actually pretty low, because the average safety record of human drivers is pretty shitty. A robot driver could just not speed and drive relatively defensively, and that alone would give it a big built-in accident-rate advantage, even if its raw skill was worse than a typical human driver.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hello, roboticist here. I'd like to ask you a question: how were power steering, cruise control, anti-lock breaks, fuel injection and collision avoidance radar tested before it was introduced to the commercial car market? When you've answered that question, I'd like to ask you how robotic cars are substantially different in terms of 'experimentation'.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I've heard that in China, sometimes richer people drive cars while poorer people ride bicycles. If a car hits a bike rider, the bike rider can sue for damages. Thus, it can be advantageous, and it's allegedly common, for a car driver to accidentally hit a biker, back up, and run him over again to finish him off. I wonder if and when some company (maybe Google, maybe not) will have cars that do this.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
If Star Trek (TOS) was made in the current age rather than the 1960s, Pavel Chekov would've been Chinese rather than Russian.
#DeleteChrome
If an A.I. driven car is capable of navigating Chinese traffic without incident, it can handle anything the U.S. can throw at it.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I'm sure the Chinese research team didn't send their robot car out on the public highway without having tested it a lot in the lab and on closed tracks first, and that Google's robot car team didn't, and that the people who developed power steering etc. didn't either. My guess is that none of the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge competitors did either (or at worst, not many of them :-).
And you don't send a robot car out to drive itself without a human along to override its decisions, any more than a responsible adult would send a young human out to drive unsupervised in a public road for the first time. (Some of us humans learned to drive in "driver's-ed" cars that had an extra set of brakes in the front passenger seat so the instructor could stop the car if he had to, while others learned in cars that didn't have that, so the instructor was limited to yelling a lot and grabbing the steering wheel if needed. And lots of us learned to drive in mostly-empty parking lots before going out on the street.) Presumably the Chinese car had a human backup driver who could override the autopilot if necessary.
It's more fun if you can have the backup driver in the right-hand seat and a large dog or a Terminator mannequin in the left-hand seat, but that's strictly optional.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For a test like this I'll bet they found a long straightaway with minimal curves, closed the expressway or used one that's brand new and not opened yet, and set this beast free on it.
Nothing at all like what DARPA challenge or Google do with robot cars
You're using the nice failure conditions on one side of the argument and the nasty ones on the other. That's not fair.
power steering: human is in control, power steering augments that control. if it fails, the human can still control the cars direction
Not if the failure locks the wheel in the wrong orientation. You hit a bus full on nuns in the other lane.
cruise control: human is mostly in control. if cruise control fails, the human can still control the cars speed
Not if the cruise controls locks up at full speed and does not turn off. You rear end a bus full of nuns.
if the anti-lock brakes fail, you just have normal brakes. the human can still stop.
Not if the brakes all lock shut and cause you to lose traction at highway speeds. You swerve into an oncoming bus full of nuns.
if the collision avoidance radar fails, nobody even notices.
Not if the failure is to trigger the brakes due to an "imminent collision." Bus full of nuns hits you form behind.
I share the road with unpredictable humans every day. Sharing the road with a predictable computer should be no challenge. Some people worry to much. Computers never worry. I think I prefer the computer over you.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
its called trains, subways, bicycle paths, etc etc etc.
All of which suck ass unless you live in a city so poorly designed that driving becomes even worse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FHYpzDinjY
Google's driverless car was just in the news for crashing into a Prius
A human was driving the vehicle.
LOL.... I got my masters in engineering from USC about 10 years back... I looked around the room and typically I was the only blond person there. I'd estimate that 75% of the people were of asian decent (Indian, and various asian countries). They're not coming to steal the research, they're coming to do the research!
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
I can tell that you've never commuted on a bicycle. They can be remarkably faster than cars under common traffic conditions, and exceptionally dangerous. (Never forget that a significant amount of engineering is devoted to automobile safety, virtually no consideration is given to bicycle safety.)
There are also hybrid methods of transportation: motorized bicycles are becoming more common, to tackle the hills; transit systems facilitate cyclists on both busses and trains; park-and-ride lots for motorists who can do part of the commute on trains; and so forth.
The final consideration is that cities are unfriendly to alternative forms of transportation because they were designed for the private automobile, and things aren't really going to change because the lobby groups that support the automobile (including people like yourself) fight tooth and nail against accomodations being made for other modes of transportation.
Last time I was current on the statistics, full-time cycle commuting took two years off one's expected lifespan for the chance of accidents -- and added 11 back on for cardiopulmonary health.
The sport cyclists (the ones in lycra) are a lot less attentive to laws (and safety, and good common sense) than the serious commuter cyclists -- it's a tough thing to deal with as a cycle advocate, as they think they know everything and so won't attend classes unless a court makes them do so. That's a totally fixable problem, though -- it just means one needs to actively enforce traffic laws, and have a cycling-specific traffic safety class offenders get sent to when ticketed. My jurisdiction does this already.
Last I heard google has not commented on the accident.
It was in the first article on any news site:
A Google spokesperson gave us this quote about the accident: "Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car."
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-self-driving-cars-get-in-their-first-accident-2011-8
Again, you are showing how you not only do not know what anti lock brakes are but have not driven one in a failed state.
Anti lock brakes RELEASE THE BRAKES when triggered. in other words they run a pump that actually lifts your foot off the brake in a sense (it actually modulates the braking pressure) to pulse the brakes and make the tires stop sliding. guess what, there is a failure mode for Anti Lock that leaves the valve in the bypass and you CANT STOP. I have seen this failure mode many times and there are several driving conditions that will cause a working anti lock system to completely fail and cause the vehicle to not stop. It's why Anti Lock is instantly removed from any car that is used for racing because it is inherently unsafe. If the anti lock system is being triggered and does not disengage, you will have no brakes at all. because it's triggered and releasing pressure. Stop foaming at the mouth go find yourself a very bumpy road on a downhill incline and hit the brakes when you hit the bumps to experience exactly what I am talking about. In racing just hitting the side rumble strips while corner braking will trigger this problem. And because most cars are designed cheap, Anti Lock kicks in for BOTH the wheels in the set. Front tire triggered? both front tires go into antilock. 70% of your braking power is the front so you just lost 70% of your brakes... now the rear tires have to stop the car, they ski triggering the antilock... you now have 0% brakes.
so yes. Really. Just because you dont understand the systems well does not give you the right to claim they still work when failed. a light on the dash is not "failed" FYI.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.