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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 will only buy a Google pod or whatever they're going to call it when it can safely and legally get me home from a night of alcoholic excess.
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The Google car has to be shown how to get to the garage, on your property, behind your house.
But seriously, if they'd known the way already, some people would have a heart attack.
GoogleCar: Please select the destination:
A. Before the garage where you cook your meth?
B. Before the garage where you distill your moonshine?
C. Before the garage where you grow your weed?
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.
I have worked 20 years for a major auto OEM. Every time this site runs a Google car article (and there are too many) I cringe.
The first autonomous vehicles will only operate on controlled access expressways, and upon exiting there will be areas where the driver will have to take over or the vehicles will stop.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
The technology is in it's infancy stages. Why the media keeps hounding Google on all these issues seems immature. I don't see any other competing company attempting to do the same thing, and if there is, they are definitely staying clear of the media spotlight.
I see Google making some great progress in this area, but give it time people - they will work out the kinks, but it won't be done in year.. lets realistically say that maybe in 5-10 years from now we might fathom the idea that the car is safe enough for whatever weather and situations we can throw at it.
No, homez, this isn't anywhere near "early alpha" analogy. This is like saying you're well on your way to producing a written a web server, when in fact what you've built is something which can deliver a single web page to a single client at once, and requires editing of configuration files to deliver another page.
I'm having a hard time understanding comparisons to web servers and a trams. Could you use a car analogy instead?
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Judging by how badly TFA was written.
Got it. So the cars cannot handle changes in traffic markers.
So they cannot deal with new stop LIGHTS but they can deal with new stop SIGNS. WTF?
And it would be "unmapped" for the first attempt. Right? Because the cars should be sending back data on road conditions and such to HQ. Right?
And the car needs the map to drive, right?
So they just drove over the same "few thousand miles of roadway" again and again and again and again? Until they got to 700,000 miles?
As it should. Because you don't know if that piece of paper is covering a rock or a pothole or whatever.
Isn't that one of the easier problems? The car waits until it detects a gap of X size where X is dependent upon the speed of oncoming vehicles and the distance it needs to cross PLUS a pre-set "safety margin".
I'm going to map my drive to work, by driving it a few dozen times. Then the car can take over. I don't care if it's no good in parking garages or my own driveway. I'll spend 3 minutes driving from my house, let the car take over, let the car do the boring freeway driving, and it can alert me when I'm 3 minutes from work. Then I'll take over and get into the parking garage and park my car.
Are we really whining because a brand new technology can't do EVERYTHING for us? Because it only takes care of MOST of the drudgery?
"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?"
Google is just trying to accurately mimic the real driving population.
I can go to my provincial (Canada) government website and download the entire traffic map,
I have worked in GIS road mapping for years and government geocoded maps do not have driveways marked. Google has access to that type of data yet they still need to pre-scan roads. Also the mapping for the autonomous car is not just about the road. It also maps things close to the road. For example, that blob of pixels may be a person or it may be a mailbox. They are treated differently by the vehicle.
If you mean the car will not swerve madly into the other lane,...
No we mean moving a couple of feet within the lane so the sidewall does not get ripped out causing an accident.
If you need car to park itself, there is already technology out there TODAY on the roads.
Sure it works for parallel parking but that is only one kind of parking. That algorithm does not work for angle parking or side by side parking.
If a car can drive itself 90% of the way,
Google is not even close to that yet they make it seem they are.
Look this is a question of cost. Self driving car must be able to detect the end of road or a hole or whatever so if google did not already install a radar or similar to check the road status ahead, it would be incredibly dangerous. And a radar or similar detection device would be far better at detecting :
1) pothole
2) slowdown speedbump
3) whatever the state of the road
better than human say, at night. Or in the fog. Or distracted.
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Google isn't detecting potholes? Back in 1985, we had that on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The LIDAR on top of the vehicle was generating a ground profile. This was for off-road driving, where that's essential. I'd assumed Google was doing that; they have a Velodyne laser scanner that provides enough information.
In traffic, sometimes you can't see a pothole because it's obscured by a vehicle ahead, but if the vehicle ahead doesn't change speed, direction, or attitude, it's probably safe to proceed over the ground it just covered. On high speed roads, you can't see distant potholes clearly because the angle is unfavorable, but if the road ahead looks like the near road, and the near road profiles OK with the LIDAR, the far road is probably good. That's what the Stanford team used to out-drive their LIDAR range. (We didn't do that and were limited to 17MPH).
Fixed road components should be handleable. People, bicycles, and animals are tough.
Although, in the real world, the vast majority of cars do nothing for most of the day. They sit in parking places and garages. Many don't move for days or weeks.
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Gavagai80 has a true point of contention.
There does not need to be an infinite amount of cars driving around. In fact, we probably don't need the number of cars that we have right now if we converted a large number of them to selfdriving.
If I could call a car to pick me up and take me somewhere at a price that matches my car payment per month, it's a total win. No fuel costs, no insurance costs, no maintenance costs.
Bryan