Slashdot Mirror
Hidden Obstacles For Google's Self-Driving Cars
Paul Fernhout writes: Lee Gomes at MIT's Technology Review wrote an article on the current limits of Google self-driving car technology: "Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn't drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn't be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole? If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014. Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can 'drive anywhere a car can legally drive.' However, that's true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It's vastly more effort than what's needed for Google Maps. ... Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains. Nor has it tackled big, open parking lots or multilevel garages. ... Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels — meaning, Urmson agrees, that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop."
Paul continues, 'A deeper issue I wrote about in 2001 is whether such software and data will be FOSS or proprietary? As I wrote there: "We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?"'
I just played with one of these at the California Academy of Sciences, and waving at it was one of the things I did to see whether the visual representation of the lidar's output was real. It had no problem detecting that I was waving, or the movement of individuals in the crowd around me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are some other videos but this one was the neatest one I think. About 1:30 in it shows a cyclist.
Google cars handle bicyclists and pedestrians just fine. They even understand the bicycle-style hand 'turn signals'.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - you can see it at 1:11. A bicyclist shows that they're going to turn right and the car 'blacklists' the area left of the bicycle.
Says the asshole [cyclist] who pays nothing for the road he drives on
In the UK, the car licence (which was once and largely still is called the "road tax") has ceased to have anything to do with road usage. It is now entirely about carbon emissions, under Byzantine rules by which many cars, some even high performance ones, pay no "road tax" at all. Even before that the road tax had long ceased to have a direct connection with road financing. Most road milage is actually paid for by local authorities who are mostly financed by a tax on houses, including those of non-drivers.
In any case, most cyclists have cars too, so are paying the "road tax" anyway. Having said that, I would be quite happy to pay road tax on my bike - it might shut up people like you.