Google Using Self-Driving Car Data To Make Cars Smarter

cartechboy (2660665) writes "One thing Google has perfected is using massive data sets generated from users to improve user experience. Google's self-driving cars may be subject to the same cycle of improvement, as they have racked up considerable mileage on public roads, and each mile generates data that Google engineers can use to 'teach' vehicle. Meet Pricilla — a Google test driver on the self-driving car project as she does a video walk through of some of the improvements created so far. Some are fairly simplistic, for example: 'The car does move to avoid large obstacles." That said, the car can also detect a bicyclist signaling and stay clear — oddly, even when that cyclist changes his mind and zig zags a little." Google is now testing cars on the city streets of Mountain View.

Comments

Still waiting to see 3 things

[NewWorldDan]

1. Cop directing traffic
2. A more complicated construction zone with a badly marked detour
3. A snow storm

Things are coming along nicely, but I still imagine these are a decade away. Still, they should be common and affordable by the time I'm ready to plow through a farmer's market.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Missing.Matter]

A snow storm is the big one. Also, rain and dust can be a big problem as well. The thing is, when you R&D these systems in sunny California, silly things like "precipitation" seem to get forgotten. I remember seeing a presentation about the Google street view cars, and how when they deployed them to other regions, they had to institute lens cleaning procedures because they had pretty much forgotten it rains in other places in the world.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[CastrTroy]

To add to this, if the car is good enough to drive itself 99.9% of the time, how well will the driver be able to drive when the car fails and they have to take over. All systems I've seen require the user to be paying attention in case something goes wrong with the computer. When the computer is good enough that you haven't had to do any driving in the past 3 months, how much are you really going to be paying attention when something goes wrong?

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Missing.Matter]

I know what they use. I use the same sensors. Rain is a problem. Dust is a problem. Snow is a HUGE problem. Of the sensors on the car, the Velodyne HDL-64E on top is by far the most important, and provides the most critical data used for localization and detecting dynamic objects. With rain in particular laser beams can get refracted or reflected by the raindrops, which incredibly fuck up your distance measurements. The typical solution is to do a lot of filtering (i.e. take the median of two measurements) but this cuts down your effective frame rate, which already isn't that high to begin with.

Snow pretty much guarantees that "manual operation mode" is going to be a primary interface in autonomous cars for a long time to come, as we wait for not only sensors to get up to speed, but also machine learning in general.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[i kan reed]

I think a fallback behavior of stop safely and pull over before [confusion situation] is well within algorithmic acceptability.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[American AC in Paris]

When the computer is good enough that you haven't had to do any driving in the past 3 months, how much are you really going to be paying attention when something goes wrong?

I'd suggest that once this is consumer-ready, the vast majority of "something goes wrong" scenarios where the car doesn't know what to do would fall into one of two categories:

• "I don't know what to do, therefore I will come to a complete stop (and pull over to the side of the road, assuming I can identify a safe path);" or
• "If I can't react adequately to this situation, there's very little chance that you, meatsack, would have done even half as well as I can manage right now."

These things'll never, ever be perfect. They will almost undoubtedly reach a point where they're at least an order of magnitude safer than humans, though. That'll be more than good enough for most people.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Re #2: People do die from complicated and badly marked construction zones from human error. Happens all the time. So the computer does not have to be 100% to be vastly better than a human. Having the humility to slow down, instead of the human pride that causes us to drive hard forward in the face of uncertainty, will be a huge advantage to the computer program.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Bing Tsher E]

But since you've been using the automatic function for all the sunny days, you're out of practice driving when the manual operation mode is required. In other words, when you need your driving skills most, you're sorta dumped into the role but out of practice.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Animats]

A better LIDAR sensor is needed. Something more like the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR. Right now, it costs too much (about $100K) but that's because they're hand-made in Santa Barbara for DoD and space applications. It has custom ICs made in volumes of tens. Volume production would bring that way down. You don't get the full circle field of view of the Velodyne, so it may take multiple sensors.

To deal with rain and snow, you need "first and last" return data. This is used in air to ground sensing to sense both the top of tree cover and the ground underneath. With that, and a good frame rate, you'll be able to distinguish rain and snow noise from solid objects. You'll lose range in heavy rain and snow, and will have to slow down. That's OK; humans can't see through it either.

Radars can. What's Google doing on the radar front? Off the shelf automotive radars are getting pretty good. Modern millimeter radars can see pedestrians. The older units from the Grand Challenge days could only see car-sized obstacles, maybe motorcycles.

In the future...

[Ichijo]

...our children and grandchildren would wonder why we ever allowed humans to operate motor vehicles on public roads.

Fucking Cyclists are ruining the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking cyclists are going to have a free lunch with self driving cars.

Just plain old taking over the streets because they know the computers will give them right of way everytime.

Google needs to program the cars with some assholery in mind where scaring cyclists is as common as checking for the car's fuel.

Re:Fucking Cyclists are ruining the future.

[Ichijo]

What if there's no bike lane, or it's filled with debris, or the bicyclist needs to make a left turn?

Re:Fucking Cyclists are ruining the future.

[PvtVoid]

If grid lock, anger, douch baggery, and killing automated cars is you goal, then sure. Otherwise, we will just have the self righteous assholes going 15 MPH in a 25 MPH zone becasue they are too precious to use the bike lane.

And the car will have the simple common sense to wait ten or fifteen seconds until it's safe to go around the cyclist, who will inevitably catch up at the next traffic light anyway. This behavior seems to elude humans.

Re:Fucking Cyclists are ruining the future.

[Ichijo]

If you were stopped to let a bicyclist pass on the right, it suggests you were about to turn right, and that you hadn't properly merged into the bike lane as you are legally required in the USA outside of Oregon. A safe bicyclist knows that it's unsafe to pass on the right.

Re:Fucking Cyclists are ruining the future.

[peter.kingsbury]

The Romans?

Road to Hana

[portwojc]

Lets see it drive the road to Hana and back. That would be interesting. Bonus points for not getting yelled at.

Not sure we need it

[nine-times]

These kinds of problems do need to be addressed, but I'm not sure they need to be *fixed* before you turn this into a product. For the snow-storm example, I don't think the car needs to be able to drive in the snow. It's much more important that the car is capable of detecting "this is a situation in which I can't operate safely," and refusing to try. It should be good enough if the car's AI can say, in effect, "Listen, human, I can't take responsibility for driving in this snow storm. If you're comfortable driving in it, go ahead and take manual control. Otherwise, we're staying right here." On the other hand, I could see an interesting application in providing some kind of intelligent 'driver assist' for bad weather conditions that helped the driver maintain traction.

Regarding details, I think the ideal would be for most road conditions, detours, and traffic issues to be kept up-to-date on a database that could allow for dynamic routing instead of the car relying completely on markers. It's not a complete solution, but again, it may be enough to pair a large database with some ability for the car to say, "I don't know what to do here, so I'm going to either give back manual control or pull over and wait."

Re:Not sure we need it

[HornWumpus]

Look at the accident rate in areas where in snows part of the year.

It appears that people can't remember how to drive in the slick for 6 months. They have to relearn every year.

Re:Smart cars are an abbomination

[Kjella]

oh, right, you drive so much better then everyone else..just like everyone else is.

It's not that hard to beat the average and the ones who drag it down tend to not give a fuck. One is teenagers, I wasn't very good back then but hey the only way to get experience is to drive and you couldn't pry the license from the cold, dead hands of most them. Resulting in several total car wrecks and at least one person in my class who died in a 100 mph crash not that long after graduation. The other is the elderly, my mom finally gave up driving so now I can quite openly say that she should have given it up years ago. Realistically though, what are their options? Bicycle? Not a chance. Public transport? For a few things I guess, but mostly too far to walk and not going when and where it needs to go. Taxi? Possible I guess, but a simple trip to our cabin (1 hour drive x2 for trip/return x2 because they'll charge you both ways since they don't get return passengers) becomes hideously expensive even with the money saved on not having a car.

The same goes for everyone else with some health problem that really suggests they probably shouldn't be operating a motor vehicle and they know it. I think most families with small children would go crazy without cars, back when we didn't have cars we also mostly had stay-at-home moms. Or we're just temporarily impaired, like I've almost fallen asleep at the wheel and mostly likely only the rumble strips on the side kept me on the road. And even then I didn't stop, it was at the end of a five hour drive but I was only half an hour from my bed so I chanced it, loud blaring music, open windows to get fresh air rushing and caused myself a little pain to keep the body in alert mode. Stupid? Dangerous? Sure. But the alternatives sucked donkey balls, which is exactly why it doesn't matter if you're above or below average - you're not going to give it up anyway.

Yeah because snow storms can't be predicted

[SmallFurryCreature]

It takes an incredibly narrow minded and anal personality to come up with situations 99% of customers will never encounter and therefor conclude that because 1% might encounter them in a life time, an entire line of products is useless.

Oh no, a product isn't perfect for everybody! USELESS!