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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
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?!
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.
You'd think it would be obvious to some of the folks at slashdot that pontificating about a grand idea is much, much easier than making a simpler idea actually work right.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No, it's just shows the brakes in our education system, after the breaks were put on in the eighties and we started to loose what we had at our peek. No doubt due to the hoards of new students. Whew, well gotta go. I'm beet.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It's news because it's a different approach.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Says the people who load it into the nose of the nearest passing elephant?
Alternatively, the torso or midsection of the car, because that's where the 'trunk' obviously is?
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
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.