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The Documents From Google's First DMV Test In Nevada
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum contributor Mark Harris obtained a copy of the DMV test Google's autonomous car passed in Nevada in 2012 and associated documents. What has not been revealed until now, is that Google chose the test route; that it set limits on the road and weather conditions that the vehicle could encounter; and that its engineers had to take control of the car twice during the drive.
All of the recent articles about autonomous cars seem to be trying to make people think they're terrible will never work and are a disaster waiting to happen.
All of these tests and such aren't being done so they can release an autonomous car tomorrow, its an ongoing process and will take time. I don't blame google for not wanting to publish all the details about it, its a research project and the media seems to have an agenda to make autonomous cars into the boogeyman
Ofcourse it is not 100% ready for the real world. It does not mean it should not be deployed though.
Not every technology and device that made it to market first worked with 100% accuracy the first time.
It just means that drivers should still be paying attention to the road at all times instead of being distracted behind the wheel. The faster it comes to market, the more quickly the improvements can be made to advance the technology.
- SK
Why does version 2.0 of your application still not have all its features?
Because code takes time. And you can't just manpower your way through it.
Ofcourse it is not 100% ready for the real world. It does not mean it should not be deployed though.
We need the power they said, it will be fine they said, don't worry they said.
The citizens of Chernobyl
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Part of driving is dealing with a certain percentage of drivers who either don't know or simply fail to follow the 'rules'. But, I can see why roundabouts, particularly multi-lane ones, would be difficult to program the algorithms for. Part of effective roundabout driving is a bit more anticipatory than many other driving tasks.
I think the part about other drivers was the dmv claiming that failure to navigate a roundabout is not grounds for failing a human applicant. This report does more to illuminate how low the bar is set for any driver, machine or human.
Why does version 2.0 of your application still not have all its features?
Because code takes time. And you can't just manpower your way through it.
A roundabout is simply nothing more than a right hand turn at a yield sign, followed by an exit ramp. If your application can't handle that, then why the hell is it on the road in the first place? And what connection does this have to what *other* drivers do?
I have seen perfectly sober drivers go the wrong way on a roundabout. Self driving cars in a beta if not alpha program having to contend with asinine drivers like that would understandably need human intervention remember this is not a finished product, not even a release candidate, it is a limited alpha release it will be improved by the time it gets to market.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Ofcourse it is not 100% ready for the real world. It does not mean it should not be deployed though.
We need the power they said, it will be fine they said, don't worry they said.
The citizens of Chernobyl
Interesting analogy, since the Chernobyl accident was not caused by the power plant's automated systems, but by human beings that overrode the safety systems designed to prevent just such an accident. Interestingly, the Three Mile Island accident occurred for essentially the same reasons: humans prevented the automatic systems from functioning correctly to prevent an accident.
The only slight problem with that is that in order to react at all in time, you must be paying the same amount of attention as you would if there was no autonomous drive system at all. This is otherwise known as the human being in the loop. Removing the human from the loop in aircraft automation has been a source of unending problems, and only recently one could say that it's a reasonably well understood problem - if not quite solved just yet. Don't forget we're talking about trained professional pilots here.
So, when faced with a self-driving car, the relatively untrained non-professional driver will always be so far out of the loop, that there's no way for him to overtake control safely in real time.
If you read the article, in the instances where the automation didn't know what to do, it pulled over and stopped:
Construction work, however, proved trickier. When faced with a partially blocked-off road, the car switched between autonomous and manual modes and then braked to a halt, requiring Urmson, the safety driver, to take control.
The driver doesn't need to react in time - the car does that. The driver merely needs to make the next decision to start moving again and guide the car to where it needs to go.