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Michigan Builds Driverless Town For Testing Autonomous Cars
HughPickens.com writes Highway driving, which is less complex than city driving, has proved easy enough for self-driving cars, but busy downtown streets—where cars and pedestrians jockey for space and behave in confusing and surprising ways—are more problematic. Now Will Knight reports that Michigan's Department of Transportation and 13 companies involved with developing automated driving technology are constructing a 30-acre, $6.5 million driverless town near Ann Arbor to test self-driving cars in an urban environment. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms and mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems. "I think it's a great idea," says John Leonard, a professor at MIT who led the development of a self-driving vehicle for a challenge run by DARPA in 2007. "It is important for us to try to collect statistically meaningful data about the performance of self-driving cars. Repeated operations—even in a small-scale environment—can yield valuable data sets for testing and evaluating new algorithms." The testing facility is part of broader work by the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Facility that will include putting up to 20,000 vehicles on southeastern Michigan roads. By 2021, Ann Arbor could become the first American city with a shared fleet of networked, driverless vehicles. "Ann Arbor will be seen as the leader in 21st century mobility," says Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Transportation Research Institute. "We want to demonstrate fully driverless vehicles operating within the whole infrastructure of the city within an eight-year timeline and to show that these can be safe, effective and commercially successful."
Yeah, throw in the random human factor ... cut off the car, turn right from the left lane, ignore speed limits, tailgate, drift from one lane to the other while texting, make unsafe rolling stops through an intersection where even though the car has a green light it's going to have to jam on its brakes, children randomly running into the street, and cyclists who alternate between acting like they're entitled to drive on the road and driving anywhere else that suits them, pedestrians who come out from between cars and don't look.
Hell, put it behind a dump truck spraying gravel. Find a city bus which is going to jam into your lane whether you're in it or not. Ambulances at intersections. A construction detour which technically has you not following any identifiable lanes. Have people run red lights and blow through stop signs.
You know, the kind of stuff we all see every day. Try like hell to find out what its corner cases are. I'm sure they're there.
Teaching it the rules of the road only goes so far. Because many drivers and pedestrians seem oblivious to those.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I am glad they picked a location that experiences Winter in all its harshness. I always wondered how an autonomous car would deal with all the challenges that Winter driving poses. Black ice and snow covered surfaces are the worst of the conditions, but throw in snow patches, high winds, variable visual conditions, etc and the software will probably start showing its weaknesses.