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Cadillac SRX Converted Into Self-Driving Car
fergus07 writes "There's been much talk about self-driving cars in recent times and the latest glimpse into this autonomous future comes from Carnegie Mellon University where researchers have loaded a Cadillac SRX with an array of sensors that allow it to manage highway traffic, congested roadways, and even merging on and off ramps."
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
My guess is that, at least initially, a driver will be required to be in the drivers seat at all times ready to override any actions taken by the car. In that case, the driver would likely be at fault for not correcting any action taken by the car that leads to an accident, just as in some vehicles out on the roads now, a driver is responsible for making sure he/she doesn't crash into other cars even when there is a system that can detect obstacles and take action or if the car can park automatically.
The liability will probably end up being rolled into the insurance system. Automated vehicles will have black boxes and record everything that happens, so there will be none of the my word against his word that happens in so many crashes now. It will be quite easy to determine who or what was at fault. The growing use of dashboard cameras is already a step in this direction, and some US insurance companies already offer discounts if the driver installs a data recorder. If the problem is truly technical and not driver error then what will probably happen is that once the cause is determined the car-owner's insurance company will work out the issue with the manufacturer. We may even see fine print in vehicle sales contracts requiring that the owner handle any liability issues through the appropriate insurance companies. And, if liability does become too much of a problem in the US then the self-driving car industry will simply move to countries where it is not. If the US cripples the industry with lawsuits it is possible that China or Europe will end up leading the way to autonomous vehicles.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
allow it to manage highway traffic, congested roadways, and even merging on and off ramps.
This is how you know self-driving car tech is not quite ready, when they are bragging about being able to manage an off-ramp.
Seriously folks, we are not going to have a fully autonomous car by 2020.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, I can't imagine anyone who'd rather be able to nap, read a book, or do anything other than staring at the bumper in front of them during a regular weekday commute.
If someone has to sit behind the wheel pretending to drive then self-driving cars will never catch on. However, the goal is to have vehicles that do not need someone waiting to take over at a moment's notice. Once true self-driving cars are available I suspect that they will catch on very fast. Most driving is tedious. Vehicle that allows people to do something constructive while their vehicle takes them wherever they need to go will probably be quite popular. And then there is the aging population that wants to stay mobile even after they are unable to operate a vehicle safely. If these vehicles can be made truly self-driving the transition to self-driving cars may happen quite fast.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
If the technology actually works to the point that it truly is autonomous, that will be amazing. It will mean I can go on long drives and actually look out the window. I can read or write or watch movies during my commute. Plenty of people will like that. If it works.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The just need to invent a way to make the left turn signal blink regardless of whether the car will be turning left.
You assume that people could trust the technology. My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
What you're describing is better served with public transit or something.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
I'd love to see these systems handle someone in the right turn lane with their signal on swooping over 3 lanes and turning left. And the cost involved in changing every car over to this would be so high as to make it a pipe dream.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This capability has been implemented for years. The DARPA Grand Challenge has had many capable entrants, including (I believe) CMU. All of the described behavior was required years ago in the Grand Challenge.
See DARPA Urban Challege 2007:
http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
To even qualify:
National Qualification Event
The NQE for the Urban Challenge was divided into three separate test areas, each with its own flavor and set of challenges:
The NQE A test course required robots to safely merge into and out of two-way traffic in a tight, circulating course. Needless to say, this led to some hair-raising moments for some of the traffic drivers. Besides the complex timing and scoring being recorded by course officials, traffic drivers would alert officials to aggressive behavior with an ever-popular horn blast. Amazingly, in eight days of testing, only one traffic vehicle was actually struck by a robotic vehicle, a testament to the progress of the teams and DARPAâ(TM)s focus on safety.
The meandering NQE B course tested robots on their ability to stay within a lane as they traversed this 2.8-mile course. One section, affectionately termed âoeThe Gauntletâ required the robots to delicately maneuver through a series of parallel parked cars and road obstacles. A final test on the NQE B course required the robots to find an assigned parking spot between adjacent parked cars, then safely pull into and back out of the spot before proceeding on its mission.
NQE C was traffic intensive, consisting of a series of four-way stop intersections for the robot to negotiate, each with its own arrangement of traffic. Robots had to recognize the other vehicles at these intersections, determine the order of precedence and then safely proceed through the intersection when it was their turn. For the second half of the NQE C course, various road blocks were emplaced and the robots were tested on their ability to recognize the road block, execute a U-turn and dynamically replan a new route to complete their mission.
>> Cadillac SRX Converted Into Self-Driving Car
Audi had this problem back in the 80's.
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
To get to the point where they actually are safer than one being actively piloted by a human. Furthermore even if they never become completely self-driving there will be a lot of very useful spin off technology that is going to come from this research. The legal framework for these cars can be updated when appropriate. That is the easiest problem with the technology since we already know how to do that.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system
Yes people do actually want this technology. In fact I'd go so far as to say people who don't even think they want it actually do even if they don't know it yet. There already are self-parking cars, cars with automatic speed control/braking, stability control, ABS, traction control, navigation aids, drive by wire steering/braking, cruise control, and more. All those things are portions of a driverless vehicle. It's by no means a solved problem but we already rely on a host of technologies to make us better at driving than we could be unassisted.
I would dearly love to be able to get to/from work (~30 minute each way commute) without having to waste an hour every day with the non-productive task of driving. It is a huge waste of my time. It potentially solves other problems as well like helping handicapped people, reducing drunk driving, freeing up huge amounts of non-productive time and more.
We don't actually have to convert all the cars to driverless. It would potentially only take a fraction of them to be self piloting to improve road safety. I assure you that you do not really want my 94 year old grandmother behind the wheel of a car. I would welcome a self driving car to take her around. Any driverless solution will have to be robust enough to deal with unpredictable events at least as well as a human. A well designed system could have better situational awareness than any driver. My field of vision is only about 160 degrees even when I'm not distracted. A computer would have 360 vision day or night, be able to communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and direction, be able to react faster than any human, be far less prone to distraction, and actually obey the rules of the road. The engineering obstacles are large but so are the potential benefits.
Every time an automated car story shows up, a zillion people feel the need to show how sure they are that human drivers can handle more situations than the computers. First of all, why can't they (the ignoramuses posting this stuff) ever accept that hundreds of very smart engineers, not only at Google Research, have taken all sort of 'whoops what happened there' situations into account?
Second, why are these posters incapable of noticing that other transportation systems such as the DC subways or nearly all modern jet aircraft, currently function very well completely autonomously? Yes, Cthulhu might pop up in the middle of a subway tunnel, but a human operator will do no better than the computer in avoiding it.
One more reference: several USAF fighter aircraft are designed for high maneuverability, and are in fact unstable. Only tightly-bound wing surface control loops, fully computerized, keep the things flying in the intended direction.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
No one who listens to that has ever bought a Cadillac.
Rap music or whatever was popular in the 1890s are likely the only options on a Cadillacs radio.
I would love to see how this handles someone in the next lane suddenly moving into the car's lane, sideswiping it. It could look at the other side's lane or oncoming traffic too. For example, no oncoming traffic means safe to swerve into oncoming lane to avoid the sideswipe. Oncoming traffic or quickly upcoming traffic from behind, and it could just decide to accept the sideswipe as the least-harmful choice. It would be difficult for a human to take all this into account in under a second when just in regular driving mode (not racing, where they tend to keep 360 awareness).
The main advance is the progression towards real-world sensor selection and packaging. If you look at all the cars which completed the Urban Challenge, and the Google cars, you'll notice the spinning Velodyne laser sensor on the roof. It is a great sensor and makes autonomous driving much easier. Unfortunately, that sucker costs more than most luxury cars and would never be deployed the real-world since nobody wants a spinning can on their roof.
Carnegie Mellon would not have won the Urban Challenge without that sensor or the others littered all over the exterior of the car. The major advance for this new Carnegie Mellon car is comparable performance with cheaper sensors fully packaged within the car. This is a big deal since (a) economics limits which sensors you can buy and (b) the car body and shape limit the size and location of sensors. These obviously limit your overall sensing capability.
The new car also has better computer packaging. Most autonomous vehicles have no trunk space and frequently have no back seat room. For a historical perspective, Carnegie Mellon's Navlab 1, which found a spot and parallel parked autonomously in 1992, had racks of computers and an extra air conditioning system to handle the heat load. Urban Challenge vehicles also had racks in their trunk areas. The Cadillac SRX team was able to cram all the computational gear out of sight. This is really Moore's Law, etc but it is still a respectable achievement.
Then live closer to your work.
Great solution! So when are you buying me a new house?