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Mercedes-Benz's Self-Driving Concept Car Is Here
cartechboy writes: Mercedes-Benz has finally taken the wraps off its autonomous concept car, dubbed the F015 Luxury in Motion Concept. Shown at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas last night, the concept is a self-driving, fully-connected, hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid that touts a vision of driving in the future. Mercedes says this concept is not only a means for getting someone from one point to another, but also a usable space for entertainment or work as well as a platform for communication and interaction. The hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid system is unique in that it produces zero emissions at all times. It consists of a hydrogen fuel cell stack, a lithium-ion battery, and two electric motors. The F015 has a driving range of 124 miles with a fully charged battery, and up to 684 miles with a full tank of hydrogen. While not intended for production, Mercedes shows us that it has the technology today to produce a zero-emission vehicle that can drive itself. In related news, Audi has just shown off an A7 that drove itself 550 miles from San Francisco to Las Vegas for CES.
The nuclei were formed in the first few seconds after the big bang. Molecular hydrogen didn't form until about 380,000 years later, after the photon epoch.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, my car can't even figure out when I say 'redial', and gets about four of of ten numbers wrong when I try to dial a number directly.
I disagree with your assertion, and it just so happens that I have a software development background that includes voice recognition, visual interpretation, and vehicle communication systems.
Voice recognition is a really cool subject. There are a finite (and surprisingly small) number of sounds that make up the English language. But for each of those sounds there are nearly an infinite number of dialects. This is combated by looking at the context of each individual sound to find known sound patterns. This can still result in thousands of different words, so we look at the context of the sentence. And through out this effort you have to deal with people talking quickly/slowly, while emotional or out of breath, with a southern drawl or a New York accent, or ESL folks that may say put words in an order that makes the context obvious. Heck, we did it for early onset dementia patients. The amount of work it took to dial in the VRE even when we knew the specific user and their inflection/dialect was massive.
When it comes to visual recognition, the AI for a car doesn't need to understand what a dog is, it just has to recognize that there is an IR source on the current trajectory. The AI doesn't need to comprehend what a boulder is, it just needs to recognize that there is an obstruction in the road.
The AI doesn't need to be able to identify that there is a lady wearing a yellow spotted sun dress doing interpretive dance while high on mescaline in the middle of the road, it just needs to identify that there is something in the road and respond accordingly (slow down, swerve, stop, etc...)
The exact same thing is true for humans. For example: the other day I was driving my wife's car. I was pulling out from the gas station and something caught my eye after I thought traffic was clear. So I slammed on the brakes thinking I missed something. Turns out it was a reflection of a dash light on the side window.
Yeah, there will be false positives. A vehicle may decide that a pothole is actually an obstruction, or that the railroad track is the end of a road. But in the vast majority of cases these are targets that the vehicle can identify from a significant distance away. It's not like you're going to be driving on the open road then come screeching to a halt for no reason.
And each of these false positives is something that will be handled through refining the AI system. Through IR, RADAR, real-time 3-d surface mapping, V2I communications, V2V communications, etc...
It's coming, and quickly. And many municipalities and states are looking to leverage the V2I systems. If you have a V2I enabled vehicle in Las Vegas, you can actually get the system to tell you how fast you should drive to avoid hitting red lights. Most major metros already have systems in place picking up tire pressure and blue tooth signals to determine traffic volume and speed, which is how those fancy "12 minutes to exit 123" signs get populated.
As the 2017 cars start rolling out and more data becomes available, we'll see technology leaping ahead. For example, in Wisconsin, our 511 site has a public facing developer API, so even if the state can't invest in some cool new apps and vehicle information systems, individual developers and manufacturers can: http://www.511wi.gov/Web/extra...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs