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A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You
moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"
In former German Democratic Republic, car parked YOU!
Priui? Pri?
Table-ized A.I.
'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'
Well certainly not with that attitude, lady. The tech has been available for some time, and legal in-roads have been paved for their use. Now someone just needs to step up to the plate. Thanks for announcing that that someone wont be you.
While it's a neat idea for a self parking garage. I saw a concept(?) previously where you drive your car into a "single car container" and when you left, your car in it's container would be shuttled off to a compact/secure storage array like a tape in a server room storage rack. Even though it requires more track and sensors, that system seems to be more realistic than a system that requires every car be programmed to understand the signals being broadcast by the garage.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.
People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.
Oh really now?
Google has already been testing the cars on the road in Nevada, which passed a law last year authorizing driverless vehicles. Both Nevada and California require the cars to have a human behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time. So far, the cars have have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers, Google says.
Source dated Tue October 30, 2012
Someone's a touch behind...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The Germans love driving. They love driving fast. I can see why it is set up so that "the first self-driving vehicles will perform only specific tasks." To numerous of them driving isn't just something to get from point A to point B. Which is why most German cars didn't have cupholders, etc that American cars did back in the 80s.
I was recently working in Germany and a coworker mentioned that some lawmakers want to put a speed limit but there is heavy, heavy resistance funded in part by VAG and Benz. He likened it to America's gun culture. and with that analogy some of the stuff some of our gun rights advocates say makes sense to them. (Not all of it, some of it is crazy rhetoric.) You don't touch Germans' driving/cars and you don't touch Americans' guns.
wikipedia says:
Another article is here.
If it were up to VW, no advanced technology would ever be ready for the showroom. The company likes to tinker around the edges of existing technology and charge huge amounts of money for it. And Germany isn't going to allow anything that new-fangled on its roads anyway.
True innovation will have to come from other companies in other countries. There are easy ways of getting useful self-driving tech into cars right now, with little of the complications of Google, no laser 3D scanners, and little risk. All it takes is a desire to do so and some political will.
Your arms hang limp at your sides...
It's only "very, very hard" because people have an inflated sense of safety when a human is in charge. People can regularly cause accidents, but a single error by a machine will threaten the entire technology.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
Charging people at a risk level that has substantially dropped? They'll be pissing their pants in excitement. The reduction in risk turns directly into profit.
Manual : Those that can drive a real car
Automatic : Those that can drive a real car but don't understand how it works
And Self-Drive : Those that should have taken the train; and should not be allowed on the road without all of their assists.
Obviously the latter fits in with the two former; modern driving aids like auto park, lane detection, radar follow and brake - even ABS and ESP mean that really, if that's all you have ever driven, you should not simply be allowed on the streets, with me and my kids in anything 'manual' - IMVHO
Of course this happens in Ingolstadt.
I'll go back on my meds now.
If GM ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as
I don't read AC A human right
Life safety critical autonomy is very, very hard.
Perfection is hard, but beating a human operator is not. Humans constantly crash vehicles, but we just accept it as a matter of course.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/06/mbta-driver-crash-held-second-full-time-job-with-bha/4M66jdB3J0HCnx2DwEwt7K/story.html
How fucking had is it to design a system that prevents two electric trolleys from colliding? It's really fucking easy. Wire it up so drawing a load from any two adjacent blocks trips the circuit breaker for the block in the back. It's a practically bulletproof design-- get too close to the train in front and you lose power. Humans...even humans with "a decade of experience and a perfect safety record" really suck at this stuff.
The REALLY hard part about autonomous vehicles is that they eliminate jobs in the short term. Go tell the Teamsters that $75/hr truck drivers aren't needed in this world, and then go run for office.
>> Annie Lien, a senior engineer...near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"
Are you sure that the smartest people live in the Valley?
I have an inflated sense of safety when I'm the human in charge, but just the opposite is true when I'm in a car with any other human in charge (especially my mother, she's scary). I'd feel safer in a car controlled by Skynet than I do in a car being driven by another human.
If GM or other major car companies ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as they test as being safer than average human drivers to a high confidence level, probably using DUI convicts as test beds.
Given a reasonably self driving car, I see a shift away from breath testers for driving to 'you can only take self-driving cars for X years', even if the system costs $40k. Just the breath system is like $10k for the first year, what with all the maintenance required, going by the road signs declaring 'YOUR FIRST DUI CAN COST $X', with breakdowns. Add in the thousands probably saved in insurance, etc... It adds up.
I don't read AC A human right
Back in my DARPA Grand Challenge days, I saw fully automated parking as the first "killer app" for automated driving. Everybody was obsessed with automated freeway driving, but that's not what annoys people. Looking for parking annoys people. The general idea is that you get out of your car at your destination, and it goes and parks itself somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it and it comes to you. Parking then need not be as close to the destination; a big parking garage a mile away is fine.
The first application of this should have been for airport rental cars. You rent the car via your phone, and the car comes to the loading area near baggage claim and picks you up. When you're done with the car and at the airport, you get out at the departure area, and it drives itself to rental car return. Customers would save an hour on every plane trip. That would sell.
It's workable. At no time is autonomous operation above about 20MPH necessary, which means slamming on the brakes is sufficient to deal with most problems. All the rental cars are new and under common ownership and maintenance, so the self-driving systems can be checked out on every rental. The system could be expanded to include the top 10 destinations for rental cars - major hotels, convention centers, etc.
After 9/11, no way would autonomous vehicles be allowed in an airport terminal area. So that didn't look promising back in the mid-2000s. Today, though, with terrorism down to nuisance levels, it's worth looking at again.
As for VW thinking that automated driving is more than a decade away, both Ford and Mercedes have said they expect to have it in production vehicles in five years.
With sensor located in the garage and sending data to the car, anyone could temper with the data sent with some appropriate knowledge and tools and giving the car bad directions and instructions. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead, there's no problem, nope, there's no pillar there at all."
If he thinks the car insurance company will have it bad, wait what is going to happen to us.
Fully automated cars means less cars and lower fuel consumption, that will translate in fewer bought cars, less car mandatory insurance, less road taxes and less fuel sold. Our governments will have their tax income cut in half.
If you think we are in a bad position now ...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This is the most fundamental of economic arguments, and why "King Lud" smashed the looms and formed the luddite anti-technology movement. You are thinking about the low-wage jobs that are lost, but completely ignoring that the same parking garage will now need to hire a high-wage computer technician to manage the system and keep it running.
One way this can play out is that the car makers will self insure (i.e. their own cars). Ford, GM or Toyota are big enough to handle this.
So all these fired valets go back to school and earn a degree in electronics and communications? We need to leave a few jobs for the people with low skills and low motivation. It would cost the society more, when these hungry despo people fall into crime or become homeless.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How would this result in less cars? People are going to still want their own, for convenience. The shared model may work for some, but that will be made up for by rich parents buying self-driving cars for their small children. Imagine not having to drive your kid to soccer practice, but have a car do it for you... Since there is no need for drivers licenses for those cars, there will be a lot of cars sold for children's use, which will more than make up for those that are using the shared cars.
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
People who need charity should get charity, not anything else that hides the fact that they're getting charity.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Perfection is hard, but beating a human operator is not. Humans constantly crash vehicles, but we just accept it as a matter of course.
I don't, and I don't. The failure of your argument comes when you realize that you would be replacing a large number of independent operators, most of whom do not "constantly crash vehicles", with a unified system that, when it fails, can potentially crash many of them.
I don't crash my car very often (once rear-ended at a stoplight). I also don't hand my keys over to someone I don't trust to drive my car. By using an automated driving system, I would be replacing a known quantity that has a proven track record with an unknown potentially disasterous quantity that obeys the laws that appear in Risks Digest.
You might be able to fix this with a HOSTS file.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
9 to 5, 5 days a week is 40 hours. A car is personal space, it has your stuff in it. Imagine having to take everything out of the car every time you arrive at work and when you get home. Its not going to work.
That's because all human beings are different and a mistake is just that, where as a fleet of identical machines can all have the same design fault. They are not the same thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's all about the price you are willing to pay for this luxury.
If it costs you 10k$ a year to own one, as opposed to let's say 500$ to rent one when you need it, you will think about your priorities.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The REALLY hard part about autonomous vehicles is that they eliminate jobs in the short term. Go tell the Teamsters that $75/hr truck drivers aren't needed in this world, and then go run for office.
Stop, just stop with the argument that it will destroy work places. Of course it will, but the problem is something else. Less work was the initial argument of introducing machines in industry and home: it will do the work for us and we can enjoy more free time.
Why this doesnt work is that the "small" people don't see anything of the profit they make with the work of machines because the corporations and bosses just keep the profit for themselfes.
So, next time you complain about loss of work place you blame the greedy guys who threat us like slaves, not the technological advance or machines.
Having the same design flaw is good, it means it's easier to avoid and fix it. Random errors are much harder to prevent.
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