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Tesla's Elon Musk Talks With Google About Self-Driving Cars
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has been thinking about bringing autonomous driving technology to Tesla's electric cars. Quoting Bloomberg:
"Musk, 41, said technologies that can take over for drivers are a logical step in the evolution of cars. He has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system. 'I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self- driving,' Musk said in an interview. 'Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.' ... Google’s approach builds on a push for the driverless-car technology long pursued by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which held vehicle competitions for carmakers and research labs. Anthony Levandowski, product manager for Google’s self-driving car project, has said the company expects to release the technology within five years. 'The problem with Google’s current approach is that the sensor system is too expensive,' Musk said. 'It’s better to have an optical system, basically cameras with software that is able to figure out what’s going on just by looking at things.' ... 'I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based,' Musk said yesterday in an e-mail. 'However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.'"
Musk later warned not to take this as an actual announcement.
No. The point of a car is to get you from one place to another. Driving is one of the most boring tasks imaginable, except on a few roads like BC's Sea to Sky Highway when the traffic is light. The vast majority of driving situations are tedious.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
The problem is called "humans". Humans love to bask in the feeling of being in control, especially when it comes to cars. With planes, this was different, especially as these from their beginnings on were called "flying machines", i.e. machines made to fly ( with ). I remember that my grandma, born in 1900, never ever called them differently. Cars, OTOH, have never been called "driving machines". And this is where the crux is hidden: humans want to control their cars. I guess it will remain so for a long time.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I know we're probably not going to read the articles, but... can't we have a link just for old time's sake?
No. The point of a car is to get you from one place to another.
If "transport from point A to point B" was the sole use case for automobiles, the only model in existence would be the Ford Fiesta.
You may not believe or understand this, but some of us actually enjoy driving.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-07/tesla-ceo-talking-with-google-about-autopilot-systems.html
As someone who's actually done this stuff, LIDAR gives solid data, but is range-limited. Cameras have more ambiguous results. Cameras are most useful when things are going well, as on a highway under good conditions. That was Stanford's approach in the Grand Challenge. All their vision system really did was answer the question "is the near section of road (within LIDAR range) like the far section of road"? If the LIDAR said the near section was OK to drive on and the vision system said the far section was like the near section, then the vehicle could speed up and out-drive the LIDAR range. That sped up travel on good sections of road.
Google is using Velodyne LIDAR units, which are effective but an expensive mechanical kludge. A better approach is from Advanced Scientific Concepts, which has an eye-safe flash LIDAR. No moving parts.
ASC's units cost about $100K each, but that's because they're hand-made for DoD. The technology isn't inherently expensive if made in volume. It uses custom imaging ICs, and because they're made by tens, not millions, they cost far too much. If the cost can be brought down, the vehicle can have multiple LIDAR units around the car to get full coverage, rather than one big spinning thing up on the roof.
Millimeter radar is also useful. It's good to have a Dopper anticollision radar as a backup system. It provides an unambiguous "rapidly approaching big solid object" signal. We had one of those on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle as a backup to the fancier LIDAR system.
Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
I like the notion, and it's a great frame of reference for consideration. One major distinction between planes and cars: When a plane is on autopilot in a relatively sparse chunk of sky, the time between sensor warning and twisted burning wreckage is tens of seconds to minutes. Most of the time in an ordinary flight plan the plane can wander hundreds of feet without a problem. On a typical chunk of sparsely populated two lane highway, however, If your car's autopilot travels twenty feet out of its lane -- things get exciting very quickly.
Moreover, most airplanes are like long-haul trucks -- they spend most of their miles in transit between heavy traffic areas. A major chunk of American automotive miles are spent with other vehicles within a few dozen feet.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
really nice roads along the Mississippi in southeastern Minnesota
You country wusses. If you want some excitement in driving, try Manhattan. Driving on an empty road is no more challenging than flying with nothing around you, but Manhattan is like the Battle of Britain.
I enjoy driving, on a Sunday afternoon, driving down deserted country roads with no need to be at any particular place at any particular time.
I pretty much hate it otherwise. Now here's the deal, there are some very strange desires people have. Some want to be beaten. Others want to be tied up. And others want to be tied up and beaten. And still others want some combination, or neither, of these two activities combined with having jello pudding thrown at them.
So, given that, I'm going to rule it as not entirely impossible that you're about to tell me that you think commuting to work by car is awesome, and the bit you love the most is when you're about 10 minutes from work and suddenly see red lights in front of you and realize that the next mile of traffic consists of cars travelling at about 5-15mph, stop, start, stop, start.
But I really, really, doubt it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Once cars are robotic enough that we are only giving guidance to the car (pretending to drive but the car will ignore stupid inputs) insurance will become the battleground. I can see a car company like Tesla offering free liability insurance with their cars. They will know that basically their car can not cause an accident and with the camera/computer system will have the proof to avoid a he-said-she-said situation.
At the same time I can see the insurance companies realizing that a huge huge HUGE market will simply go away when car accidents become unlikely enough for car companies to be able to cover it. Think about it. Every car that you see is paying in around $1,000+ for insurance. The only insurance people will want after robotic cars will be theft (hard to do with a hi-tech upgradable car), vandalism, trees falling on them kinds of insurance. Plus nearly every jurisdiction says you must have something like 2 million in liability; that need will vanish or at least be covered by the manufacturers.
So my robotic car prediction is that car companies will be trying to terrorize us into hating robotic cars. They will show videos of families being driven off cliffs, or saying it is our god given right to have control of our cars. And of course they will spend ungodly amounts of money lobbying everyone from the president down to your school board to stop this.
But the simple reality is that 35,000 people are killed every year in the US and robotic cars might take this down to a few hundred. (mechanical failure, trees falling on them, sinkholes, etc)
Electric motors need a transmission too.
If by transmission you mean a fixed ratio reduction gear. Electric motors have actually been used for years to eliminate the need for variable ratio transmissions, which often don't work well w/ high torques or other situations that electric motors handle gracefully. That's what the electric part of a diesel-electric locomotive is - an electric motor used in place of a transmission. They're built that way because mechanical transmissions can't cut it.
Teslas engineers were just too incompetent to build one correctly.
Tesla subcontracted the transmission design, and three companies, all of which have extensive experience, couldn't produce something that worked right. Tesla's solution was to improve the electric motor and drive electronics, which gave them equal or better performance than was originally anticipated with a transmission, but without the weight or unreliability of a mechanical transmission. Tesla's "incompetence" led to a better car.