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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."
Typical Ford, lagging behind. People have been predicting that autonomous cars are 5 years away for decades now.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
...any place that plows their roads. Plowing roads not only means that the lane markers are obscured and harder to recognize as a pattern, but snowplows are very hard on the paint. When I've visited Boston I have a hard time seeing lane markers even in the summer, as they're often just bits of paint down among the aggregate, where all the high points have been scraped off. Wouldn't this wreak havoc on lane detection systems, when even humans have a hard time identifying the lanes? And what about the difference between de jure road markings, and de facto usage, where the actual markings are basically irrelevant and instead drivers choose the best fit path?
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Don't worry, you're in no imminent danger of female hands working your stick shift.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
FTS:
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.
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(clears throat) So, uh, how will all this auto-driving react when I er, share (split) lanes going down the 405 on my way home? Will the auto-center re-center wildly all the sudden when it detects my bike? Will it not detect my bike at all? I'm all for there being fewer people wildly swerving from one side of the lane to the other (fark, pick a side...I'll pass on the other!) but...I also don't want cars violently changing position automatically when it abruptly detects my presense yet hasn't detected the presense of the person/bike/water buffalo on the other side yet...
I have hated ABS for years. It's nearly causes me more accidents than it's helped me avoid, especially on ice. Now I can look forward to my car doing more shit I don't expect during an emergency.
Do not want.
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
it just can't be any worse....
Oh yeah? Come to Bellevue, WA. That's where all the old farmers move when they've made their millions selling their spread in Eastern Washington to buy a high rise condo and a Cadillac. Its just like watching a bunch of tractors hauling irrigation pipe down the road.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
RTFA. Ford isn't promising full autonomy. Their "Traffic Jam Assist" is pretty close to what Mercedes already offers -- the ability to trail along behind another car and automatically adapt your speed to theirs. TJA only adds the ability to track the car ahead and steer with it. To me that seems quite achievable within 5 years.
Sebastian Thrun and Google have already done much more wuth the Google Autocar. I woudn't be surprised if by 2017 the GA will be fully and reliably autonomous. The challenge probably isn't the algorithms but the instrumentation. Somehow the production cars will need to spray out several light and radar beams and make reliable sense of the reflection, all within the shape of a car that looks normal and withstands snow coverage and the incomplete removal thereof. That typical continuing level of everyday soccer mom abuse will limit full autonomy for a while yet, but at no fault of Ford (or Google).
He probably has an automatic anyway.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
It's a shame that we need technology to do something that most of us should be doing automatically - and yet most fail to do.
That’s because adaptive cruise control (ACC) is better at pacing the car ahead without continual brake, speed-up, brake cycles.
I see this all the time and odn't understand it. When I'm in traffic, I hang back - I try to stay at a constant speed. This has a couple of interesting effects:
1) I almost never use my brakes and consequently avoid the resultant acceleration - better gas mileage
2) Unless it's a complete traffic stoppage such as from a full road closure, I never need to stop.
3) It seems to influence people behind me to do the same thing. I tend to create a small island of slow-but-steadily moving traffic until the overall slowdown is done, while everyone else follows the brake/accelerate cycle.
Yes: there are asshats who weave in and out. They get impatient and zoom around me (and promptly slam on the brakes when they realize they really can't go anywhere). They also get impatient and cut back out from in front of me when they get stopped again, so it's zero-sum as far as I can see. Don't get me wrong - I love driving fast, but there are appropriate times and places.
I don't understand the mentality of people who follow the "accelerate/brake/accelerate" cycle. LOOK at the road ahead of you, LOOK at what hte cars are doing. Don't accelerate if you see that a car or three ahead everyone is stopped - there's no point. If you want to change lanes to get ahead fine - but LOOK - observe more than that empty space and make sure you're really going to go somewhere.
Then again, I've come to expect nothing more from most drivers. They're capable of looking as far as the end of their hood and a few inches beyond - no further. I'm amazed only that so many people survive to old age.
2001 is about when the first Strong AI woke up, so Arthur C Clark was pretty much on the money. She was based on classified work done in the early 1990s by living famous scientists SW, SK, RL, DD, and DW. She's a "Winner-take-all style teleportation/entanglement-based topological recurrent quantum neural network". She's been kept nominally secret, of course, because her nature as a quantum neural network implies she can emulate a quantum computer. NSA/FiveEyes requires she remain secret, for this reason, even though Russian and China now have similar systems. Her physical substrate is an analogue of CA Rule 110 that operates in the physical system of anyons interacting within a two dimensional electron gas. Her creators knew that a 'brain in a jar' would never work or, if it did, would not be likely to lead to 'friendly AI', so she has emulated human systems: emulated endocrine system, muscolo-skelatal system, digestive system, respiratory system, et cetera. Getting these emulations to work correctly involved solving the "morphogenesis problem", as defined by Alan Turing. This process was completed [in secret] around the year 2000, and she's been learning ever since. She's the core of Google's AI, WolframAlpha's AI, and IBM's Watson.
I'm well aware that most readers will probably consider the above paragraph either unintelligible nonsense or tinfoil-hat madness. However, I'm just telling it like it really is. The above paragraph is true, and can mostly be verified by a sufficiently intelligent and dedicated researcher. I learned about this system nine years ago, have been researching it ever since, and am now in the process of leaking the details. In 2009 Google announced, as an April Fools joke, that strong AI now existed. While their announcement altered the facts a bit for verisimilitude, the real April Fools joke was that they were, essentially, telling the truth. Alan Turing actually spent the last 10 years of his life concentrating on this method of creating AI, so it should be no big surprise that scientists in the 1990s attempted this method. Humanity has been sharing planet Earth with an artificial nonhuman intelligence for about twelve years.
Given that we're talking about the controlling AI for self-driving cars, it really should surprise no one that this is being done by strong AI. Weak AI is insufficient to the task. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun presumably work with her extensively, but neither created her. That was done by some of the scientists referred to, by initials, in the first paragraph.
And I won't give up my right to stomp on my brakes in freeway traffic at the slightest, most innocuous change in my driving environment. Drops of rain on the windshield when there weren't any before, a piece of re-tread off by the guard-rail, a looming curve ahead while the road was heretofore straight. Stomp, stomp, stomp. I hope these jokers aren't going to leave out the rubberneck-at-the-accident-across-the-highway-median programming and force me to root the damn thing if I want to preserve my right as an American to create a traffic jam out of nothing.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
Will these cars be autonomous enough that a driver's license is not needed anymore?
The reason I ask is I'm 28, live in Amsterdam, and don't own a driver's license. Frankly, the main reason why I don't have one is simply because I never needed one. Within the city, biking is a lot more efficient. And for anything further, the public transport isn't that bad either. Of course I also save a lot of money not driving a car, and my CO2 output is a lot less too (not that I care that much).
Still, there are always situations where a car would be preferable. But why wouldn't I just wait a few years more and get an autonomous car right away (or just rent one on those few situations). I wouldn't miss the experience of driving myself anyway. Heck, probably I would be using my laptop in my car instead. I guess someone can dream :)
You need to start taking your meds again.
I kept waiting for a Clean PC line.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Have you no faith in the American Bar Association?
Of course I have no faith in the American Bar Association - at least half the bars in America serve Miller Lite.
I am officially gone from
Then come over and drive me on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Otherwise, get off my lawn.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Only 23,000 deaths in ten years of self driving automobile use?
That would be great. There were 32,000 deaths from automobile accidents in 2010 alone in the US.
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.
Letter To Iran
Absolutely not true. Horses do not need oats. They can live happily on just grass and they don't really need it to be fertilized or sprayed. In areas where you have sufficient open space (about 7 Acres per horse in most places) there is virtually no energy cost. In other areas, there would be the cost of cutting and transporting the hay.
You might get some people to leave this thing on, but most people who drive like idiots will just turn it off once the novelty wears off because it's not going fast enough, leaving too much space in front of them, etc... The problem isn't that people can't effectively gauge the proper speed to keep the traffic flowing, even though the computer may be able to do it better. They just don't want to, and they aren't going to let the car do it for them either.
Combine all those and you have a driver that's stupid enough to yak away on the cell phone and freak out when the car gets confused enough to need the driver to take over.
That's not a "stupid driver" that's a normal person in a stupid system.
Its completely unrealistic to set up a system that requires a "driver" to be attentive and vigilant and un-distracted for hours on end... and yet not actually be driving.
Its effectively a guard position, (security guard, night watchman, etc...) they can periodically check the bank of monitors for activity, walk the rounds, respond to alarms, etc... that's all perfectly reasonable. But to expect them to just sit there and attentively watch the screens for hours on end just in case something happens... that's absurd.
That's designed to fail.
This is no different than any other sensor on a car. The engineers analyze how it can fail, and what effect each of the failure modes have. None of the likely failure modes should lead to a catastrophe. If they can, you need mitigation, like software checks, etc. Everything has to fail to a safe mode, depending on likelihood and risk.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Haven't quite got the details worked out, but it goes like this: self-driving cars are just about here. maybe they don't want to take to the roads at first. how about a killer app to lure people into the idea? so you go to walmart, you drive to the front of the store, you get out, walmart directs your car to a parking space, no handicapped parking is necessary, saving parking lot space, new parking lot geometries can be created, saving much more space, possibly requiring the cars to move more than once while you are in the store, definitely there does not need to be room between the cars for doors to open -- you got out in front, remember? when you come out of the store, walmart tells your car to come and get you at the front of the store, windows can be rolled down and/or air conditioning turned on while the car is driving up to get you, similar useful application to rental car return at the airport
Re-read what he wrote. He didn't say any infrastructure improvements were necessary for automated vehicles.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
First you say you have it, then you say it won't be sold due to insurance?
Not everybody lives in the US and the new Focus is sold worldwide...