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Self-Driving Car Will Make Trip From San Francisco To New York City
An anonymous reader writes with news that Delphi Automotive is undertaking the longest test of a driverless car yet, from the Golden Gate Bridge to midtown Manhattan. "Lots of people decide, at one point or another, to drive across the US. College kids. Beat poets. Truckers. In American folklore, it doesn't get much more romantic than cruising down the highway, learning about life (or, you know, hauling shipping pallets). Now that trip is being taken on by a new kind of driver, one that won't appreciate natural beauty or the (temporary) joy that comes from a gas station chili dog: a robot. On March 22, an autonomous car will set out from the Golden Gate Bridge toward New York for a 3,500-mile drive that, if all goes according to plan, will push robo-cars much closer to reality. Audi's taken its self-driving car from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, Google's racked up more than 700,000 autonomous miles, and Volvo's preparing to put regular people in its robot-controlled vehicles. But this will be one of the most ambitious tests yet for a technology that promises to change just about everything, and it's being done not by Google or Audi or Nissan, but by a company many people have never heard of: Delphi."
I was wondering how they planned to handle refueling (and maybe in the future, recharging). When they figure that one out, imagine what this kind of system will do to the trucking industry.
They don't even have to figure that one out. All they have to do is institute full service fueling to replace cardlock fuel stops. The trucks pull in, someone wanders over and fuels them, the trucks pull out again when they detect that the tank has been closed and the attendant has moved away. Extensive monitoring and high-resolution cameras will eliminate the need to have a human on board entirely.
Presumably, a car with a telepresence robot in it (just enough to communicate with attendants, not to drive the car) could conceivably already cross the country simply by stopping at full-service stations, if not for the legal impediments.
Besides commuting, OTR trucking really is the "killer app" for self-driving automobiles, and it's coming sooner than people think.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More impressive would be for the car to drive from one end of New York to the other. During the day, avoiding highways, dealing with really chaotic traffic on narrow, poorly marked roads full of distractions and ambiguities.
Highways are simple. Traffic flows in one direction only, clearly marked and wide roads, no intersections, all roughly the same speed. No surprises. It's where by far the fewest accidents happen for human driven cars, even though it's boring and probably the part where human drivers pay least attention. Doing an hour of highways, ten hours of highways, 100 hours of highways - it's just more of the same. Now it's cross country, tomorrow it'll be cross country and back. And back again. As long as the fuel will last.
I just was going to mention the CMU project and someone beat me to it. They drove nearly autonomously from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. Here are some (old) relevant links:
The CMU project was not anything that was near consumer-ready and it also was not 100% autonomous. IIRC, humans had to intervene in more complicated driving scenarios and the autonomous system handled the open highway stuff. they report a figure of 96% or so autonomy by miles driven on a shorter trip from Pittsburgh to DC. So it's not like they had everything figured out back in 1995. But still...1995!
Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.
Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.
Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.
Funny because sensor fusion isn't so simple. It's a big step from auto following a car to actual autonomous driving on freeways in a more reliable way than even the worst human drivers. Comparing the state of the art today to sunny day freely moving traffic human drivers - we are no where near humans. Add heavy rain, dirty sensors, snow, road construction, etc and we will have need for humans to sit and nanny autonomous vehicles from the inside for a long time.
Furthermore all this "solved problem in 10 years" smacks of the leading computer scientists in the 60s claiming they could beat the best human in 10 years. Then it was another 10. Granted it was only 4 times of saying 10 years so yes eventually. Further still there is the legal ramifications of when the first human fatality due to autonomous driving occurs - common sense and logic will take a back seat to "think of the children" in the USA and we both know it. We are more likely 30 years out than 5-10. However what chaps my hide is people saying this stunt of using a combination of cruise control, lane following, and car distance following is autonomous driving is like saying Siri is strong AI.
Something I've lately been wondering: has anyone yet figured out how to get a robot vehicle to recognize when a cop is behind them with flashing lights and to pull over? Or, if an emergency vehicle is approaching with siren blaring, do likewise? Seems like that would be a good way to hijack the load of a robot truck.