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Programming Safety Into Self-Driving Cars

aarondubrow writes Automakers have presented a vision of the future where the driver can check his or her email, chat with friends or even sleep while shuttling between home and the office. However, to AI experts, it's not clear that this vision is a realistic one. In many areas, including driving, we'll go through a long period where humans act as co-pilots or supervisors before the technology reaches full autonomy (if it ever does). In such a scenario, the car would need to communicate with drivers to alert them when they need to take over control. In cases where the driver is non-responsive, the car must be able to autonomously make the decision to safely move to the side of the road and stop. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed 'fault-tolerant planning' algorithms that allow semi-autonomous machines to devise and enact a "Plan B."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:perfect should NOT be the bar! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    this is a HUGE pet peeve of mine! if we deployed self-driving cars tomorrow we'd see a huge drop in overall accident rates ...

    The above is merely your opinion, and is NOT to be confused with a fact,
    most especially because there is no data to support your absurd claims.

    Fortunately, people who are far more intelligent than you are will be the people
    who make the decision regarding whether autonomous cars are used for more
    than testing.

    .

  2. Re:they're a disaster by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're basically deathtraps on wheels and they don't work at all

    SDCs have already logged hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads, and have a safety record better than human drivers.

  3. Re:they're a disaster by burtosis · · Score: 4, Informative

    I worked for 7 years in a robotics lab so i do know a few things about vision and vehicle automation. What grinds my gears about this is every last mile was pre planned. Routes were mapped in gps, every last sign, stoplight and speed limit was pre-programmed in. Every single test was on a sunny day with free flowing traffic. Even under those circumstances the algorithms spazzed out and did very unhuman like things. Sure it sounds nice to lock up the brakes for a blowing trash bag but that's asking to be rear ended and is highly dangerous.

    TL:DR they took ideal conditions under which normal humans fare far far better than on average and ran their AI. They then compared this mean time between failure to what humans have to deal with on average in totally different enviornments - rain and snow - asshole drivers in traffic jams, unexpected icy conditions - drunken driving. It's not science it's intellectually dishonest.