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Will the Google Car Turn Out To Be the Apple Newton of Automobiles?
An anonymous reader writes The better question may be whether it will ever be ready for the road at all? The car has fewer capabilities than most people seem to be aware of. The notion that it will be widely available any time soon is a stretch. From the article: "Noting that the Google car might not be able to handle an unmapped traffic light might sound like a cynical game of 'gotcha.' But MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. 'While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high,' Leonard says. The list of these 'rare' events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49)."
Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow, both of things people in the Bay Area rarely experience.
I'd imagine it's pretty damn hard. Harder still is figuring out whether that stop light applies to the lane you're in, and the direction you're turning. Stop lights don't always line up with lanes exactly, they don't always point straight, etc etc.
If they built special lanes or only worked on places like the Freeway. It would be nice to have a self driving car for a 6 hour road trip and then manually take over in the cities or where the car had issues.
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Safer (autonomous) cars could save tens of thousands of lives. Given that safety is one of the governments biggest reasons for existing, they should be doing everything they can to make autonomous cars a reality as soon as safely possible. Accordingly, if that means having up to date records for traffic signals, roads etc, then, well, they should have up to date records.
I think the problem is that "good accuracy" is not yet to the point where the driverless car is less likely to run over a pedestrian at an intersection than a car piloted by a human.
I very much disagree with this assessment. Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human, which is the important criteria. If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.
Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...
almost genius in its idiocy. If self-driving cars really start to hit the roads, cities would definitely mandate that all traffic lights show up in maps, and require that traffic lights show up in maps before being installed. This is not a problem of the driving car, it's a problem of trying to imagine future technology in a current context, which is of course always going to lead you astray.
Plus, as other commenters have said, self-driving cars can definitely recognize traffic lights. It's just that right now they aren't quite as good at doing that as humans are. The reason is that traffic lights and construction cones and stuff like that are optimized for human visibility, not robot visibility. It's quite trivial to adapt them for robot visibility as well (perhaps even incorporating stuff like specialized radio signals).
I predict that horseless carriages will never take off because without an animal like a horse with hooves on the ground, you could hit rocks and fall into ditches without knowing it.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
> What we need is better geo-mapping from cities themselves
For driver less cars to work, the whole city should be wired so the google car doesn't have to recognize the red light, it would just get the information through some type of wireless transmission thus knowing it has to stop. It may fall back on A.I. on country roads with not much traffic but then again.
A.I. is not advanced as we sometimes think it is. Even good drivers can have trouble recognizing a red light in bright sunlight conditions.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The only way a car can be designed to safely self-drive is doing it just the way we do: by creating a local, up-to-date mapping of the surrounding area in real time and working within that representation with sufficient skill to respond to anything that might appear.
Pre-existing environmental mapping simply cannot keep up. Construction, pets crossing the road, wild animals, falling rocks, pedestrians, vandalism of road signs and traffic indicators and lane painting, washouts, drunks, heart attacks, stinging insects, oversize loads swinging around traffic lights and signs, special transports, some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"... the list of unpredictable effects upon the local driving environment seems almost endless -- and keep in mind these things can occur in combinations of more than one type and more than one incident. Often suddenly.
Further, if the car is smart enough to be capable of updating the environmental map in real time and deal with any combination of changes, then it's already smart enough to maintain a completely dynamic local mapping and doesn't need a pre-existing mapping for anything but gross navigational purposes (route planning) and even that can require the vehicle to adapt.
Contrariwise, if it isn't smart enough to maintain a full local environmental mapping, then it is inherently unsafe.
Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think the real goal would be to have all vehicles self-drive; then they can be coordinated to interlace at intersections, removing the need for stop lights and saving a ton of fuel!
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
would people do it often enough. Yes. Yes they would. Around my place it happens about once a week that somebody reprograms a construction sign. And you seem to not understand how teenagers work. When they steal a stop sign, are they thinking they're hoping to kill somebody? No, no they are not. They think it's funny. They don't stop and think what the consequences of their actions are. You're problem is, you're applying logic to a fundamentally illogical situation. People and logic are separate entities most of the time.
And I'm glad your algorithm to handle sabotaged location sensors is so dead brain simple, but what about the algorithm to detect them. Remember, you have to assume somebody is trying to do it and not have it detected. That's where the lols are. Or are you proposing that a sensor bank is kept in the car? How is it updated? Kept in a cloud based server? What if there's a DDOS or wireless connection is currently unavailable? What happens if somebody forgets to enter a node into the database, remember, road workers probably aren't the most intelligent folks, and the bureaucrats will view entering that info as the road crews job.
You've oversimplified a problem in the extreme. This is a stupidly difficult problem because the world is big, complex and extremely dynamic. Seriously, if the cars simply pull over if it detects sabotage, what's the average failure rate of these chips? even a 99.99% non-failure rate means there's going to be a hell of a lot of cars stopped on the side of the road for no reason, angering everybody who's now late for work.
Sounds good! Newton was commercially available, has a loyal fan base and inspired successive generations of more polished and popular products, including Palm and Apple's own iPhone. True, there is no guarantee that just because you release an early adopter product, you will reap most of the benefits when technology matures. But not being on a lookout for new things guarantees slide into irrelevance, like Kodak or Borders. Besides someone got to do it.