Slashdot Mirror
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.
and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by.
Sounds like it's got a bug.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
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
Or maybe you should STFU as the 405 is a highway in CA. It turns out to be legal to split lanes in CA.
Damn CA-ians center-of-the-universe**... ;^)
In case you didn't know, There's a 405 in Oregon (stadium freeway), and a 405 in Washington (east-side lake washington).
Although there were efforts in both state to allow lane-splitting, lane-splitting remains against the law in both states...
FYI, you might have easily predicted the existance of 405's in other states if you knew the interstate highway numbering convention "XYY" (where X is odd for spur routes and X is even for bypass/loop routes and YY is the nearest interstate in this case Interstate 5 which goes through CA, OR, WA)
**yes, I currently live in the center of the universe, but I do visit the back-country from time-to-time ;^P
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