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Will the Google Car Turn Out To Be the Apple Newton of Automobiles?

Posted by samzenpus on from the flop-or-not dept.

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)."

21 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??

    I would've thought some of the better Slashdotters could write software that recognizes a traffic light from a camera feed, let alone the geniuses at Google.

    1. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??

      Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist. He found out that Google maps out roads, keeping a database of signs, lane markings, etc. He then concluded that the Google car only works on pre-mapped roads. That is not true. If the car is driving on a pre-mapped road, it will use the info from the database. But it can still drive on other roads with good accuracy. There are still come problems to be worked out, and plenty of testing to be done, before SDCs are ready for sale to the public. But TFA is a very inaccurate description of those problems.

    3. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...

    5. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ls671 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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.
    6. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by cheater512 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If the cars that fall back to AI then communicate their observations and decisions back to Google then to other cars then the next car wouldn't need AI and could improve knowledge of the area, plus any particularly bad problem spots can be highlighted for further investigation at Google HQ.

      Normal drivers don't have LIDAR. I assume it is a massive assistance for some aspects of Google's work.

    7. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by TheGavster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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".
    8. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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,

      I'd really be interested if you have a reference for this. Even if your reference is just a Google PR person, that's still better than nothing.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Rain and snow? by iotaborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Rain and snow? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow

      LIDAR does not "fail" in rain/snow/fog. It just doesn't work as well. So what? Neither do human eyeballs. Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.

    2. Re:Rain and snow? by Type44Q · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.

      Considering that Texans and Okies tend to speed up when the streets are slippery and visibility's been reduced, I suspect this confirms my suspicion: hicks aren't human! :p

  3. I could see it used in specific cases.... by ArcadeNut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
    1. Re:I could see it used in specific cases.... by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think his point was:

      1) The car can drive for 2.5 hours on the freeway by itself, while you are not paying attention.
      2) When the car arrives to an offramp, it will notify you (in advanced) that it's your turn to start driving.
      3) If there is a problem along the way, the car will pull over and stop (or similar) before handing you control.

      That way, you don't have to focus intently while the car is in control.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. Re:At least ... by sexconker · · Score: 3, Funny

    Beat up Martin.
    Eat up Martha.
    http://i.imgur.com/06fu9sE.jpg

  5. Cars will be the secondary market by Bryan+Bytehead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The first vehicle with this technology is not going to be a personal car, or anything that resembles a personal car (like a taxi). It's going to be semi trucks with trailers.

    From a conference I sat in on last week (dealing with railroads, not trucks themselves), the turnover rate for truck drivers is over 100% per year. This is considered a plus for the railroads. I say that this is a plus for autonomous trucks. They drive autonomously site to site, and then, a driver takes over to get them parked into the loading dock (most likely), the trucks manage to do this autonomously (maybe, but not the scenario I see winning out, not at the beginning), or the docks are redesigned to make it easy for the autonomous trucks to park them in loading position (what will happen once autonomous trucks are widely used).

    Yes, I realize other changes will have to be made. Refueling will have to be done manually in the beginning. That may mean the truck stop hires a person or two, that then takes care of the autonomous trucks, and I'm sure the owners will gladly pay a bit of a premium to get their trucks fueled. At least until the automated fuel pumps for the trucks are in place, at existing or new truck stops.

    I have zero doubt that my great grandchildren won't have to learn how to drive a vehicle. I have grandchildren, and yes, I expect that they will have to learn how to drive, the technology is moving that fast.

    Yet.

    --
    Bryan
  6. Another stupid viewpoint from slate that is by Beck_Neard · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:Government doesn't have records by ewibble · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It really depends on how much "safer" autonomous cars are doesn't it. The current problem with software is that when it fails it fails usually catastrophically, what do you do when you fail, stop that could be dangerous, keep going dangerous too. People don't usually fail as completely as software they make lots of small mistakes but usually do a good enough job.

    the road toll is 14.9 per 100,000 per year that is quite low considering how much people drive, you would need a lot of testing, in real life scenarios to convince me that automated car was safer. And each release would need that level of testing. Yes you may get one driver who is bad kill a few people but a bad software release could kill much more.

    I am not saying automated cars aren't safer, just that just because they are automated doesn't automatically make them so.

  8. Pre-mapped environments are a dead end by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Pre-mapped environments are a dead end by mjwx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.

      I think quite a few people at Google have thought about that, came to the same conclusion as you and started working on the problem.

      The thing that people dont get is that it will take years, if not decades to get fully autonomous cars onto the road. They aren't due out in 2018 and yes we know what models are coming in 2018, an updated 370z, a new NSX and a few others no-one has any interest in.

      The first autonomous cars wont be by Google, in fact I doubt there will be a Google car, the first autonomous cars will be Merc's or Toyotas built using Googles technologies and the autonomous part will only work on specially outfitted roads (and they will be controlled, limited access roads at first) so you'll still be required to drive a car. In fact you probably wont see a car without a steering wheel or other controls in your lifetime.

      You're quite right that roads will need to be upgraded to provide telemetry to autonomous cars, and this will happen gradually over many, many decades.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  9. Like the first product in a class in the hands of by iamacat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.