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Ford Predicts Self-Driving, Traffic-Reducing Cars By 2017
An anonymous reader tips a story about comments from Ford Motor Company showing how confident they are in the autonomous car technology currently in development. They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already. They also think these cars will dramatically affect the flow of traffic. Quoting:
"Ford makes this projection, based on simulator studies: If one in four cars has Traffic Jam Assist or similar self-driving technologies, travel times are reduced by 37.5% and delays are reduced by 20%. In other words, if the freeway part of your rush hour commute takes 60 minutes, it will drop to 38. That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles. Here’s how it works: Stop-and-go ACC keeps pace with the car ahead, using a look-ahead radar and mirror-mounted camera. Lane keep assist keeps the car centered, also taking advantage of the camera in the mirror. Electric power steering is better for remote control than mechanical power steering; it can be guided by the Traffic Jam Assist black box. Sonar units — for blind spot detection and cross traffic alerts (cars crossing behind when backing) — monitor traffic to the side. Combine all those and you have a car that’s smart enough to guide itself during predictable, low-speed conditions."
I'll pass. Considering the overwhelming failure of their touchscreen controls for radio, phone, temp control and everything else, I wouldn't dare trust my life with such lousy software.
As to the overall concept of self-driving, meh. I have no problem driving myself, keeping a safe distance from the person in front of me or being aware of who's around me. It's the nutjob beside/behind me who's ghetto driving while on his phone or that person in the pickup truck who just has to get one person ahead to save that extra half second of driving time (and yes, there is someone like that I have to deal with every day).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I commend their efforts to make self-driving cars, but I see a lot of problems that I don't see a practical solution for. If they've come up with solutions then I'd really, really like to know how they work.
Just because you can't think of the solution doesn't mean there is no solution. Humans manage to figure it out somehow, and because us meat popsicles have lots of accidents that means the bar for par is set pretty low, IMHO, for an automated solution.
Plus, this, like all other technologies, will evolve over time to become better suited for the problems at hand. Can't say as much for the human brain.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's a very predictable system. It pulses the brakes when it loses traction. Don't lose traction and you'll never have to deal with it. If you do lose traction, it'll help you get it back faster, and retain more of it than you would have otherwise.
If you're a superhero driver who can drift reliably, knows when he's about to lose traction, and has a cool enough head to back off the brakes to just the right amount for maximum stopping power and maneuverability, well, you can also probably figure out a way to disable the ABS system, and make enough in stunt driving jobs to pay for the lawsuit when you cream someone.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
ABS is designed to make the car steerable under hard braking and to make braking simple for drivers who are not good at it. It has long been known that it does not necessarily decrease straight line stopping distance.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
In short, the first time someone uses this and gets in a wreck, there will be a traffic jam of lawsuits.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Someone says self driving cars, and this is all you can think about. What happened to taking chances in the name of progress. If it were up to you we would have never gotten to the moon, or taken that first flight because someone might get hurt.
snowplows are very hard on the paint
In wisconsin there are plenty of roads where they just categorically give up on road markings. The suburban subdivision in front of my house, even the feeder road to the interstate. In fact there are portions of the interstate that are unmarked, especially concrete bridges. I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly. Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without needing chalk or paint lines.
I'm curious how this strange AI driver would handle the weird stuff like merging and lane expansion and contraction (2 lanes to 3 lanes, 3 lanes to 2 lanes). Oh how about traffic circles which confuse and scare the crap out of human drivers...
Here's a thought, the vehicle sensors detect a car in the blind spot so no sense looking anymore, right? But in the home of Harley Davidson, what if the blind spot detector can't detect little itty bitty motorcycles and the car drivers have been trained not to look anymore?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
And I refuse to believe it until they are driving around Finland (or Maine or Ontario) in the winter.
The road surface may be black ice, slush above ice, slush above tarmac, dry ice, soft snow, packed snow, or bare, covering a few orders of magnitude in coefficient of friction and steering/braking response. Roads can be locally impassable due to snowdrifts, or two lanes may be constricted to one from sheer quantity of snow over some distance. And road markings and road edges can be completely invisible under snow or ice. Despite what wikipedia says, "cats eyes" are not used on roads where severe cold is expected - they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It's strong AI. It can be as effective, or more so, as a skilled human driver. You should learn about what's actually been done before you raise these issues. The issue you raise has already been solved, and in a public forum, no less.
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Unlikely. If the engineers take the basic precaution of calculating how far ahead the car can detect a gap or obstacle they can easily work out the maximum speed the car can go and still stop in time. I can't imagine engineers working on a self-driving car for the consumer market would fail to test scenarios like that.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
It seems odd to me that there should be such a Luddite tone here on Slashdot, and an egotistic assumption that humans will always be better at these tasks for the foreseeable future. I see several problems with your lane marking example. 1. If lane markings are so bad humans cannot easily discriminate them, then this should be addressed ASAP autonomous vehicles or not. 2. You seem to assume the self driving car will have no other lane confirmation information other than lane markings from some camera with human eye like contrast discrimination when in actuality, having taken the recent Stanford AI course, they will use multiple input sources and cameras to determine proper lane usage including statistical probability based on previous lane markings, the sides of the road, GPS, LIDAR, RADAR, and placement and movement of other nearby vehicle (and of the latter it will place much more avoidance weight). With Google’s quarter of a million miles already autonomously driven I would assume they often navigated areas with less than ideal lane markings (else we would be hear the hilarious situations the Google cars where constantly getting themselves into).
Yes people will balk at first, but this really is a task humans are REALLY bad at. We may be wonderful at discriminating a dog from a cat or recognizing a pizzeria from the pizza shaped sign, but the self driving car will be hugely better at determining that there is an object at of size X at distance X traveling Z miles per hour towards us. It doesn’t need to understand what every object on the road or side of the road is to operate, it won’t be distracted by video billboards or scantily clad persons of the opposite sex – it is just obsessively crunching data on position and moving object hazards all the while confirming the road ahead is true drivable pavement.
This is a hugely complicated problem, but it is well constrained with clear rules. There is nothing new about driving the self driving car needs to figure out each time. Until streets are better designed for autonomous vehicles they may be overly cautious, but I doubt hazardous, and as streets become optimized for self driving vehicles and as the vehicles themselves improve, they will be able to tear around at incredible speeds safely – if we decided we wanted to let them off the leash so to speak.
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Actually they will be MUCH safer in a world of 100% automated (>= 4 wheel) traffic.
Most of the problems with motocycles and bicycles are getting hit by idiot drivers not paying attention.
Automated cars don't fall asleep, don't listen to music, eat, drink, fiddle with the radio, text, or talk on their phone.
And when we reach 100% automated traffic the cars can do things like having all three lanes of traffic move over in tandem to avoid a cyclist.
This is not simply because it is nice to do that for cyclists, but something needed to avoid hitting, dogs, cats, raccoons, deer, etc.
It will of course be ILLEGAL to ride your motorcycle in an unsafe manner that requires automated cars to avoid you. AND since these cars are well connected be sure that the police will be notified quickly and provided with video, lidar and other recordings showing exactly what you did. So I expect that joy riding like that will be eliminated quickly as well. You get fined on the first offence. We keep your motorcycle on the second offense.