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Nissan Leaf Prototype Becomes First Autonomous Car On Japanese Highways
cartechboy writes "As car manufacturers battle over futuristic announcements of when autonomous cars will (allegedly) be sold, they are also starting to more seriously put self-driving technology to the test. Earlier this week several Japanese dignitaries drove — make that rode along — as an autonomous Nissan Leaf prototype completed its first public highway test near Tokyo. The Nissan Leaf electric car successfully negotiated a section of the Sagami Expressway southwest of Tokyo, with a local Governor and Nissan Vice Chairman Toshiyuki Shiga onboard. The test drive reached speeds of 50 mph and took place entirely automatically, though it was carried out with the cooperation of local authorities, who no doubt cleared traffic to make the test a little easier. Nissan has already stated its intent to offer a fully autonomous car for sale by 2020."
That's not a particularly difficult problem. An autonomous electric car could drop you off at the front door of your destination, then drive to a relatively distant parking lot where it can recharge using an automatic (robotic) charging station. Shortly before you're ready to leave, your would alert the car using your phone and it would pick you up at the front door.
I think for a person to own a self driving car might be the exception to the norm. I think if self driving cars work, corporations will buy millions of them, and station them in semi-patroling routes. Then people will just summon them like cheap taxis. Some people will even schedule their work day around them. The software will do all the planning on who gets what car. A guy could ride one to work, not pay parking, then the car plays taxi for the day, and comes picks the guy up at work to take him home.
If they work, they'll work big time, but I really worry about lawsuits.
God spoke to me
What if it suddenly veers into a wall or oncoming truck due to the driver being drunk or sleepy or inattentive?
Humans glitch, too. Far more often than computers.
Labor last for hours after contractions first start. Trust me you'd have time. My first one was 16 hours from the initial cramping. My cousins wife was 36. I could go on, but I'm writing on my phone. Despite what TV and Movies tell you labor is no excuse to speed to the hospital, putting both your wife, kid and others in danger. If you really feel time is of the essence, call an ambulance, let the pros handle it.
Work by Dr. Charlie Miller showed that in-auto networks have zero security. It wasn't a problem up to this point because such networks were secured by air-gap. Unfortunately automakers decided that facebook integration for the car is worthwhile feature and decided to open Pandora's box. If you are planning to buy a new car, make sure it has no connectivity capability of any kind. This includes On-Star systems, this definitely includes any kind smartphone integration or mobile hotspot technologies.
Car's CAN Bus is ring network with no authentication whatsoever and rudimentary priority system. If you can broadcast into it, then you can affect operation of the car in very drastic ways. Since it has to be real-time and responsive (e.g. controlling engine timing) there is no time for any kind of authentication. Insanity is allowing things like Entertainment/Navigation/OnStar system access to it, but this is how auto engineers do it. Why? Because they don't know any better, they are not IT Security guys.
As a side effect, this will finally, finally, FINALLY put an end to the dreaded find-a-parking-space-in-a-busy-city-on-Friday-night drill.
Self-driving cars can not only use remote parking lots, they can also make much better use of parking lot space. They are unoccupied when they self-park, so there is no need to leave room for people to exit. So they can park just an inch apart, and the absence of side mirrors will make that very close. Less space is needed for lanes, since the cars can steer optimally and coordinate their movements. Cars could park directly in front and behind each other, then when summoned by its owner, a car could signal for the blocking cars to move. The capacity of a parking lot can easily be doubled or tripled.
at age 65, fatal accidents go waaay up. i blame the old people sunglasses and old people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What if it suddenly veers into a wall or oncoming truck due to an incorrect or faulty instruction. Fuck autonomous!
You are obviously not an embedded system engineer with mission critical design experience. The proper way to design a system like this is to have multiple processes running on at least two separate CPUs. The most powerful CPU computes the car's speed and path, and another process running on a separate CPU performs sanity checks on the results. If something is clearly wrong (like steering into oncoming traffic), then the backup program applies the brakes and pulls off the road. Bits can be flipped by cosmic rays, or whatever, and a system like this is designed to deal with that. This is standard critical system engineering. Then you put it on the test track, and throw all the crap you can at it: turn off sensors at random, put corrupt data on the bus, flip bits in memory, etc. Keep hammering it and fixing the problems until it can handle any failure as safely as possible.
Not a problem...lots of biz models ...and the cars will maintain themselves. a loaner car can drive over while your car is worked on.
1. insurance includes mandatory and included in your premium sensor/systems maintenance
2. car is subscribed to or leased which includes maintenance in monthly fee
3. cars are not owned; just used like taxis; so they're maintained by a company under strict regulations
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I also do not understand why people think:
a) Speed limit laws designed for human drivers will never change when driverless cars are common.
--- to some extent in residential areas they still need a lower limit to account for children running out into the street, but anywhere you can go kind of fast now, the roads could be built for driverless cars to go much faster.
b) Driverless cars will not have an emergency mode.
Emergency situations are always a priority as transportation and communications infrastructure becomes commonplace -- think of 911 and then E911 etc.. The greater the percent of cars on the road that are driverless, the more you can just punch a "911" button and get to the nearest hospital quick with every other car automatically dodging out of your way, clearing a single lane of a multilane street just-in-time. Resisting driverless cars is tantamount to insisting that when you drive your wife to the hospital, you want to deal with random jackasses and you also do not want the police to know why you are driving like an idiot.
Make sense. You can't contract your way out of your basic obligations to society (e.g., you might be able to coerce your employees into signing a contract that says they work 80 hours a week for $1 per hour but you'll sure have some questions to answer if you try to actually enforce it) so it seems wise to think about preventing legal slipperyness before it really gets started. If there's one thing common to business around the world it's that given an inch, most will take a mile.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
I have done a lot of embedded system design, coding and integration in my life - baremetal, RTOS, bigger combined systems with RTOS and desktop os collaborating etc.
Read this
http://it.slashdot.org/story/07/02/25/2038217/software-bug-halts-f-22-flight
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
who no doubt cleared traffic to make the test a little easier.
Nothing in the article nor in the video backs up this assumption. So why was it in the summary? Having been to Japan, I doubt they would've done this, as the whole point of running the test on a public highway is to show it can cope with other traffic and real-life conditions, and making the test invalid in such a stupid and public way would mean quite a bit of lost face.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, obviously nobody has ever thought about that possibility before, so engineers have certainly not worked on making the system fault-tolerant.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Kind of funny you brought that up. I came across a line of five cars trying to get out of the parking garage downtown a couple years ago. I waited for 15 minutes before getting out to see what the hold up was. Someone had tied the arm for the exit down and the person at the front of the line was just sitting there. I knocked on her window and asked what she was waiting for. She told me she wasn't sure if it was ok for her to untie the arm so she was waiting for someone to come. I assumed she had called someone so I asked her how long she had been waiting there, two hours. I asked when and who she called and she said she hadn't called anyone. I walked over and pulled the rope of the arm which lifted up and I went back to my car. She may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but what does that say about the other four cars behind her that also didn't bother to do anything about it. If I hadn't gotten out we might have sat there all evening.