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U. Michigan Opens a Test City For Driverless Cars
An anonymous reader writes: The University of Michigan has opened Mcity, the world's first controlled environment specifically designed to test the potential of connected and automated vehicle technologies that will lead the way to mass-market driverless cars. Mcity is a 32-acre simulated urban and suburban environment that includes a network of roads with intersections, traffic signs and signals, streetlights, building facades, sidewalks and construction obstacles. The types of technologies that will be tested at the facility include connected technologies – vehicles talking to other vehicles or to the infrastructure, commonly known as V2V or V2I – and various levels of automation all the way up to fully autonomous, or driverless vehicles.
It's about time driverless vehicle testing has moved away from the snow-less climes and into an area that presents some actual challenges to the driverless vehicles.
Gary, Indiana, would have been perfect.
Just get a whole bunch of people some Jeeps, laptops, and wifi. We can have a blind, remote-controlled urban destruction derby.
What happens when the city power goes out and all of the stop lights go out -- not blinking red, but off? I'm guessing the cars know where stop lights are supposed to be. Maybe they just pull over and wait. Is it smarter than a 5th grader? What about when 4 cars get to a 4-way stop intersection at the same time? Then what do they do?
....go wrong with v2v communication?
All it would take it 1 compromised vehicle to gain access and cause complete and utter chaos.
Humans, for all their faults, are for the moment still not remotely hackable. Until this changes, I do not see automated vehicles becoming the norm any time in the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately I think it will take a major disaster before the majority of people realize this.
Just use Detroit: it's full of real roads and building, full of perils, and many parts of the city are virtually devoid of people.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Testing autonomous technologies in public areas is essentially irresponsible. It goes from Google, who is extremely professional, but still gets rear ended a lot because the vehicle is over cautious and stops where humans would not to Delphi on down where I don't trust a damn thing they do and they really shouldn't be allowed in public at this time.
It's hard enough doing simple things like straight line freeway driving that it's seen as a major accomplishment when no one dies and they can out do drunk and distracted drivers under all conditions but only under clear sunny free flowing freeway driving. These courses, akin to closed courses for learning human drivers, are a necessary first step in bringing this technology to practical use.
The real problem with autonomous driving is environment variability, like road problems, debris, construction, animals, children and pets, other human drivers etc. when a computer 'sees' a cyclist they may or may even not recognize its a cyclist (ie maybe it assumes pedestrian given its sensor history) and form some standard metrics about the expected behavior. When a human does you immediately see if you make eye contact (so you know they see you something no vehicle does to my knowledge today), if they are on a pricy bike and clothed in biking gear or in dirty clothes in a beater and looking drunk - this allows humans to more accurately predict the future using things computers can't do for at least a decade out. For all the "nanosecond" decisions in urban settings computers can do humans are light years ahead in path planning and pattern recognition. Anyone in the field gets an immediate appreciation of how their toddler far exceeds a supercomputer and 500k in sensors even in 2015.
DARPA opens test city for weapons and advanced armor technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
This, just two hours after the headline of "Remote Exploit On a Production Chrysler To Be Presented At BlackHat"
SEEMS LEGIT!
Seriously though, I'm all for automation, communication between devices, and anything else that can help optimize any system out there (this being the transportation system as a whole, not just the internal computer system within a single vehicle) - BUT we need some serious security and accountability. We've seen serious issues with cell phone manufacturers delaying security updates by months (sometimes YEARS) to handsets. Is this going to be the case with cars, too, which traditionally never even get software updates to their infotainment systems? Maybe now that these systems can impose serious risk of physical harm to individuals both inside and outside the cabin, can we get some mandated government regulation that forces software security updates on a regular basis, that also persist beyond just the first year or two of the vehicle?
TLDR: Let's get this shit security, and continue securing it over time with updates, and I'm all for it!
Now that's driving.
First time they deploy these in public, some small kids will get killed and it's game over for the auto companies. Parents with dead kids don't ever forget.
Ever.
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Seriously, why should automated cars be operating in places where kids on bikes and skateboards and pets exist?
Automated cars might make sense in secure retirement communities, where everyone is 55 and nobody minds if they die.
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Get in touch when you turn 55. Let's see how ready to die you are.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The article doesn't give you any idea where it's located. I found it in the Google Earth view on Google Maps just northeast of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute Library, 2901 Baxter Rd, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. I wonder, why hasn't the Google Maps car mapped this place out yet?
If you want a real world test, it has to be where kids, with or without bikes and boards, and pets dart in and out of traffic. Some of the 55 y/os might be dumb enough to do that, but they're too slow to make it a proper test.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
yes, they want us to drive 'driverless' cars because these cars need 360 degree and more vision and are recording _everything_ -- so, if you want to have 24h surveillance everywhere - you promote 'driverless' cars... ;)
also, what are you to want to do - I mean drive - something on your own ?? hell - no ! you are supposed to take good care of your mobile, and that's it.
and anyway - these cars are bound to have online connection - hell - why do so many people want to communicate even where they are driving ?...
Okay here's a good PRACTICAL test of these systems.
Have the car driving along an overgrown suburban street. Send a tennis ball across the road about 50 feet in front of the car. Now, right as the car moves within about 5 feet of the location, send a toddler- or dog-sized dummy out into the street.
A human would have adopted a radically different damage-avoidance routine upon seeing the ball. Will the car do the same?
THIS is why we need dash cams. Good ones, looking fore and aft with a wide enough view to deal with stuff like the cyclists and biker's lane splitting shenanigans.
Well, it's something that tends to be integrated into self-driving cars. Google has very good views of all the accidents it's cars have been in.
Since I don't reply to AC's:
1. Can't do much about cyclists other than to build your mirror a little more sturdy. On the other hand. Self driving car! It wouldn't have a mirror there, because it uses a camera & other systems, and isn't stuck in the 'driver' seat.
2. Given self-driving car reflexes, is going to result in them eating a lot of pavement for no result. Or they cut it so close that the car still runs them over, causing serious injury, but the company insuring the car also makes the drive system, and points out they have video of them diving into traffic.
3. Somebody following you? Call the police with your cell phone or use the vehicle communication button(on-star for some brands).
4. They claim, you show the black box footage, they end up paying, and maybe spending some time in jail for lying before the court.
5. Seriously? Do you know how ridiculously dangerous getting into a 'deliberate' accident on a motorcycle is, even if you're wearing full gear? Again, self-driving car, it avoids the accident, the moocher has to find his insurance lotto elsewhere. If he does manage to make you hit him, black box will show it and he gets to pay his own medical bills.
6. Toll booths - EZPass anybody?
I don't read AC A human right
Seriously, why should automated cars be operating in places where kids on bikes and skateboards and pets exist?
Because reaction times measured in the milliseconds are handy at avoiding hitting them when they dart into the road, much better than people with reactions upwards of a full second?
I don't read AC A human right
Why are we testing on humans?
Now, hamsters ...
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The grandparent was challenging the specific claim YOU made that SDC's get rear-ended because they stop too often.
The article you linked doesn't even mention any of the collisions the SDC's have been involved in, and certainly don't support the claim you made about them.
Try again.
They have a real football coach to test all this with, too?
that it is in Rick (not Dick) Snyder's neighborhood.