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Oxford Tests Self-Driving Cars
halls-of-valhalla writes "Using advances in 3D laser mapping technology, Oxford University has developed a car that is able to drive itself along familiar routes. This new self-driving automobile uses lasers and small cameras to memorize everyday trips such as the morning commute. This car is not dependant on GPS because this car is able to tell where it is by recognizing its surroundings. The intent is for this car to be capable of taking over the drive when on routes that it has traveled before. While being driven, the car is capable of developing a 3D model of its environment and learning routes. When driving a particular journey a second time, an iPad on the dashboard informs the driver that it is capable of taking over and finishing the drive. The driver can then touch the screen and the car shifts to 'auto drive' mode. The driver can reclaim control of the car at any time by simply tapping the brakes."
on your car, you have "brakes". if the brakes break, then you have big problems.
Kindly consult the Oxford English Dictionary.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
"breaks" for vehicle brakes keeps coming up here. Is this an Americanism?
But this is a story about Oxford FFS, the cultural heart of the English language, UK version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary
Agreed. Once one company has done it all others should stop.
BTW, Good thing Opera replaced its own engine with WebKit too.
none
You'd think it would be obvious to the folks at Oxford: if you're building 3D maps, and storage is getting relatively cheap, why not just build 3D maps of whole regions so the car knows its way around? Then the human can pick any route, rather than having to teach the computer.
i doubt it's meant to work with the driver sleeping or anything.
But that is exactly the reason why people want and precisely how they will use self-driving cars - so that they can take their attention off the road. Like the poster above said.. it's good for a prototype, but not for a consumer product.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Once one company has done it all others should stop.
Well, not necessarily. There could be lot of interesting (read creative) ideas one could have missed. And indirectly, it creates a healthy compitition everybody benefits from.
If that was not the case, we would have had only one type of car, only one type of plane, only one type of phone..and the list may go on.
hilarious
According to a TV report I saw on this, the point of the Oxford technology is that it's supposed to be much simpler and cheaper than existing implementations, with the development version costing only £5000, and projected price of a commercial version of just £100.
It would be nice if such the article mentioned the existence of comparable tech, such as Google's self-driving cars, and perhaps did some comparisons, but unfortunately being a science and technology journalist these days means copying and pasting press releases, so the journo in question probably actually does have such little interest in technology that he hasn't head of the Google initiative. Sad.
Oh no... it's the future.
can it change lanes? can it route around road blocks? can it stop for red lights with out getting messed up?
I'd be incredibly impressed if they managed to get the driving system is on the iPad.* But I'm sure the iPad just provides the display. There will be another box somewhere that does the driving.
* Impressed by the technical achievement, not the safety.
It's news because it's a different approach.
Theoretically this mixed with a service that has surveyed the entire road network could be amazing. It would remove the need to have travelled the route previously.
Although I do wonder how it copes with changes in road layout/diversions etc.
One would sincerely hope that it is depending on more than a single point, or single building, fix. It should have at least two or three major reference points in use at any moment, plus more ahead that it is acquiring for future use and more behind that it has passed but have not gone out of sight. I would hope that at any instant it has at least twice as many reference points as it needs.
And if all else fails, just like a human, it should have enough absolute road sense to come smoothly to a halt however unfamiliar the surroundings.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"I see you are driving down Laurel Ave and I can drive you to your destination. Are you heading to:
- Bosco's Liquor Store (1.73 mi)?
- The Bouncing Pasty Gentleman's Parlor (2.64 mi)?
- The Purple Nurple Tobacco Accessory Shop (1.25 mi)?"
".... Siri, change profile to 'Mom'."
"Okay. Changing user profile settings to 'Mom', please wait"
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
All that time and engineering effort. All that programming expertise. And yet.... it still drives on the wrong side of the road.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
To 1 and 3: almost certainly. To 2: probably not unless it has already "learned" the alternative route.On the other hand, one difference between computers and humans is that you can copy the "learning" from one computer in a way you cannot copy from one brain to another. So it would not strike me as unreasonable for a net-connected car to download the images of a detour route within a few seconds of recognising a roadblock.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Yours is broken, otherwise it would read like this working one
Google's self-driving car is probably considerably more expensive at around $250000
That is the cost of an engineering prototype. The cost of massed produced cars would be far lower. I talked to a Google engineer that was demoing one of their cars at the San Jose Fairgrounds. He pointed out a bulky optical rotary encoder on each wheel, about the size of a soda can, and said they cost over $2000 each. He said they were going to soon replace them with a magnetic hall-effect encoder the size of a penny. Cost: $3 each.
While replacing their expensive encorder certainly helps, Google has a long way to go to bring down their pricing. In particular, the LIDAR unit on the top is probably dominating the price. The model in question costs around $75,000 and as far as I can tell, Google isn't getting rid of it anytime soon.
Of note: I expect that the LIDAR unit in the Oxford car is also dominating the price, and expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
100 quid? Sounds a bit on the low side: we're talking several camera's, lasers + sensors, a control unit, and actuators for pedals & steering. Even £1000 seems too low... compare this to what you can expect to pay for factory installed cruise control.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
the car announces it's confused and you should take over, whilst zipping down the road.
Unless the people developing this are complete morons, there is no way this could happen. The car knows its safe braking distance, and if it cannot map out a route beyond that distance with an acceptable degree of confidence, it would pull over to the side of the road, come to a stop, and then alert the driver.
the LIDAR unit on the top is probably dominating the price. The model in question costs around $75,000
How many LIDAR units are sold every year? Maybe a few thousand? 60 million cars are manufactured each year. That kind of volume can lead to huge price decreases.
expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
No, it is not misspelled: initially they put the iPad on the hood
Hood? That's the leaky fabric bit you get on top of convertibles. Perhaps you mean "bonnet"?
Silly Americans naming the metal flap that covers a car engine after a type of headwear... oh, wait... :-)
Meanwhile, if they're going to test these things in Oxford I hope that they're fitting the car with an industrial strength bike-catcher and an AI that can cope with one-way systems designed by M.C. Escher.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
So these Oxford researchers are not doing something new, they are just doing less.
Doing less is a new approach. A sensible one, particularly in robotics. For example see the Roomba, vs the Electolux Trilobyte. The Trilobite mapped the whole room before designing an efficient cleaning route. The Roomba just wanders randomly, with some simple heuristics for occasionally following walls and occasionally changing direction. Result: The cheap Roomba approach is successful in the market, and the expensive Trilobite is a failure.
Here for example you mention GPS. That's of limited use, as the accuracy is in terms of meters. Far too course for self driving. And it can disappear completely in cities. And all it would do is narrow down the initial search space to identify the current location.
One way to make their system more useful would be to upload learned routes to a server, so they can be auto-downloaded to other vehicles. Then your car could self-drive even on roads you haven't driven on before, as long as someone else has driven them.
I suggest you RTFA, then you won't spend time describing something they already have slated for the future.
expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Infra-red cameras cope fairly well, better than the human eye sometimes.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
Yes, but the goal of self-driving cars is to improve on human drivers, not just replace them.
No. Just making it non human is already an advantage in some respects. I would gladly replace myself with a self-driving car if it was as good as myself. I might even be willing to pay double for a car with that feature. I mean leather seats, climate control, wood paneling interior, crazy powerful engines, are features I wouldn't pay an extra dime for. Luxury for luxury's sake is stupid, imho. As is speed for speed's sake. But give me a car that drives itself, I 'll buy one right now for twice the price that my existing car is.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
A lot of that is fixed by the information processing equipment attached to them, but that's something you really can't expect to emulate in silicon in near future - the lidar would be cheaper than that.
Ezekiel 23:20