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Self-Driving Car Faces Off Against Pro On Thunderhill Racetrack
Hugh Pickens writes "Rachel Swaby reports that a self-driving car and a seasoned race-car driver recently faced off at Northern California's three-mile Thunderhill Raceway loop. The autonomous vehicle is a creation from the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). 'We tried to model [the self-driving car] after what we've learned from the best race-car drivers,' says Chris Gerdes (who talks more about the development of autonomous cars in this TED talk). So who won? Humans, of course. But only by a few measly seconds. 'What the human drivers do is consistently feel out the limits of the car and push it just a little bit farther,' explained Gerdes. 'When you look at what the car is capable of and what humans achieve, that gap is really actually small.' Because the self-driving car reacts to the track as if it were controlled in real time by a human, a funny thing happens to passengers along for the ride. Initially, when the car accelerates to 115 miles per hour and then brakes just in time to make it around a curve, the person riding shotgun freaks out. But a second lap looks very different. Passengers tend to relax, putting their faith in the automatically spinning wheel. 'We might have a tendency to put too much confidence in it,' cautioned Gerdes. 'Watching people experience it, they'll say, oh, that was flawless.' Gerdes reaction: 'Wait wait! This was developed by a crazy professor and graduate students!'"
Seconds aren't "measly" in motorsports. They can decide an entire season championship.
but where's the video?
brake brake brake brake brake brake
the word is brake
At what speed? Like my dad always says, "Things happen fast at 100mph."
Could be the difference of one or more car lengths which is HUGE in racing terms. Not that I will ever trust an autonomous vehicle with my life.
Brakes, not breaks. Maybe it breaks, and that would certainly freak the passenger out, but I sense in this case it brakes. When you're driving at a wall braking lets you do it again, breaking doesn't. Subtle distinction I thought should be pointed out.
(This post brought to you by the collective might of the Oblivious Flaw In The Headline Committee, newly formed to point out the obvious flaw and thereby negating 50% of the discussion dealing with grammar and spelling.)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Turn left
Turn left
Turn left
Kill all humans
Turn left
A self-driving car doesn't have to pay much attention to the fragility of the human form when it doesn't have any on board.
Accelerate at 50g? no problem just add extra bracing.
"In a Race Between a Self-Driving Car and a Pro Race-Car Driver, Who Wins?"
No.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
There wasn't anything remotely related to the title, no video, no telemetry not even laptimes. And "measly seconds"? Full seconds under racing conditions are not "measly".
I was really disappointed, the title sounded really promising...
BMW did that in 2007 and it was tested by jeremy Clarckson from Top Gear. Unfortunately, BBC owns the intellectual property of the video nad has been removed from youtube
Its strength and its speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, it will never be as strong, or as fast, as we can be.
If they went with Stanford Center for Automotive Research I would remember them as something other than a Google Car competitor.
Now we just have to see how it handles dogs on the track and the odd drunk or two! A farm wagon pulling onto the road right in front of it would also be a learning experience, to say nothing of the odd whitetail deer!
One more step towards ideocracy and less freedom.
Get used to the idea that in a decade or two's time it will probably be illegal to drive a car manually. New cars might not even have controls, just a microphone to speak the destination into. Mothers Against Drivers, the government and all car manufacturers will successfully collaborate in brainwashing the general population into believing that humans are mentally/physically incapable of actually driving a car at all, certainly never safely.
a dozen driverless cars designed to race go at this. Would emergent behavior appear? Can we make them so decisions are recorded and then applied to the next situation?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
what about utility trucks that need to be place that just having a microphone / touch screen will be a very poor way to get them in to place to work on lines / even be used as a temp prop on a power pole to hold it in place.
a race track is a poor test for a day to day use of a car.
There was no face-off, it is merely a thought experiment.
It might not be a good test for how many groceries you can carry but its an excellent place to develop and test new technologies and find out what a car will do in emergency situation. If it's raining I'd feel much more comfortable if the car that's driving me has demonstrated an ability to recognize and correct over-steer or know the balance between braking/steering input when a deer jumps into the road.
EHRMAGERDES!
Rainy day one thing.
Rainy day with a bunch of kids, trees jumping out (honest ossifer), ostriches running around, moose attacks vehicle... Would depend on how reliable the system has proven to be.
The problem with utility truck drivers, they won't like not being able to stop at the strip club and bars along the way... They really hate GPS tracking...
Personally, I would LOVE if Top Gear (UK) brought in this team to test how quickly they can make the Reasonably Priced Car go around the track.
"But only by a few measly seconds."
In auto racing, a few seconds is generally considered an enormous lead.
He merely drove the human and himself off a cliff, knowing that he was merely software and would be reinstalled for the next test.
Obviously I wasn't riding shotgun with a robot. Instead, I was on an airboat in the Florida everglades. The first time the captain pointed us straight at the mangroves and gunned the engine, I freaked. Then I realized that with an airboat, you change the attitude, drift, and then accelerate. This guy was a master. He was able to navigate through the groves with just a couple feet on either side (at slower speeds of course). After the first few high speed turns, I sat back and enjoyed it just like the passengers in those cars.
He took pride in the fact that his boat had no rudder in the water, and thus was less likely to harm the endangered manatees. That first turn around a corner at speed was just one part of the experience. If riding an airboat through the glades isn't on your bucket list, it should be.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That has to be in the top 5 of incorrect word usage; fingernails on a chalkboard. Perhaps TFS needs to be written by bots too.
As self-driving cars age, their reaction times slow down, they leave the turn signal on, and they mistake the farmers' market for the mechanics' service bay.
"In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you"
Only make it the year 2015.
Be that as it may, while an AI might not get distracted and brake too late, missing the apex coming off camber off a banked curve onto a Y intersection with a side road at 90 or so, it probably would have hit a tree or something in the crotch of the Y, instead of deliberately over-correcting, spinning, and laying the tires over on the rims coming to a gentle rest in the opposite ditch, pointed in the opposite direction, if it had. Then again, most street vehicles would have flipped pulling that stunt to begin with. Speaking strictly hypothetically, of course.
Moral: choose your weapon carefully in any contest.
According to this source USB can get down to around 1 ms theoretically. In practical terms, you can get an expensive MIDI keyboard with input through USB, and that's certainly much faster than 90ms, otherwise it would be completely useless.