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How Tesla's Autopilot and Google's Car Are Entirely Different Animals (robohub.org)
Hallie Siegel writes: Developers and futurologists have long talked of two paths to autonomous cars: the incremental path (where autonomous features such as adaptive cruise control, autonomous parking etc are slowly added to make the car increasingly autonomous) and the revolutionary path that abandons the human driver altogether — the Google car approach. Robocar expert Brad Templeton compares Tesla's latest autopilot technology to the approach Google is taking, explaining why some people think autonomous cars are still decades away, while others believe they are just around the corner.
Regardless of how they get there I'll certainly never buy one. The technology if of course interesting and in some parts very advanced but even so this seems like an awful lot of effort to remove a steering wheel.
yet?
Standards are emerging and they aren't gonna be compatible until 5.0.
One looks like it was designed for adults, the other for toddlers. The google car couldn't look any more childish if had pedals inside and coloured wheels.
Just this morning, after it's not been driven for about six years for various reasons, I paid a very large garage bill for fixing up my 1991 Honda Civic.
This car has no engine ECU, no ABS, no airbags, no lane assist, no automatic braking, no shit at all. What it DOES have is four wheels, brakes, lights and something to steer it with. It also has twin carburettors and a manual choke.
First job was to fill it with petrol, and as the engine warmed up I started to remember just how good this old car is to drive. The large garage bill was well worth every single penny. It puts a huge grin on my face every single time. There's not many '91 Civics around these days, but if you have the opportunity to buy a decent one, do so and care for it. You will be rewarded.
So, as I started to say at the top, Google and Tesla, you can take your autonomous vehicles and shove them high up where the sun don't shine.
I hope they're just around the corner, but they'll be out of reach of most people. Like Tesla now.
Maybe by the time I retire they'll be reasonable so I can tour the country and never even drive.
Google approach of map everything in excruciating detail has one big flaw - it assumes that we could know in advance how the driving environment would look like and navigate based on this. This is not a reasonable assumption, simply because mapping every back road is gargantuan task. Therefore, we will end up with 'good enough' Google cars, that can drive major roads and urban centers.
Tesla (and all other car manufacturers) approach is to have car react to environment with little advanced knowledge. This is gargantuan task and is still computationally unfeasible. Therefor, we will end up with 'good enough' Tesla-like car, that can drive anywhere but still require driver's supervision.
. . . where the speaker compared the two approaches like this:
Gradually trying to move towards driverless cars instead of working directly on that goal is like thinking that by practicing jumping and getting better and better a jumping that you'll eventually be able to fly.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
Tesla pushed the "autonomous driving" out in a beta update. Immediately youtube was filled with videos of Tesla's with auto-driving enabled almost crashing as it can't handle corners, swerved into other lanes etc.
Then you have google who is taking a multi year approach of refining the technology before even letting consumers see it.
Tesla is (in my mind) looking hard to make noise about their products and it is dangerous to push out alpha "self driving" software out to the masses. It is quite a difficult problem to solve and people shouldn't be beta testers.
Sure thing gramps.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
This post literally gave me cancer.
I use a car mostly for going on the road, but sometimes, it needs to drive other places. I go to events where we park in the grass. I go down driveways that are a mile long. I have experienced emergencies where I have to go backwards down the highway. I just don't understand how completely driverless cars will work in these cases. I have driven a car with adaptive cruise control and emergency breaking. It was fantastic. Please continue down this road and make these features required.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The road maintenance will make these cars unsustainable. If they use tracks the problems are solved. This is the only way it will work for a future population size of 10 billion. Otherwise, we won't make it past 8 billion.
People are too busy sucking Elon's Musky dick to realize their "autopilot" is shit that Mercedes and other luxury cars have included for years. Tesla is playing catch up but journalists are too busy playing catch they don't realize it.
As for google, jesus christ, why are your cars so fugly?
I would characterise it differently. One is trying to engineer out all the risk, while the other is going to shape the perception of the risk in the market.
The reality is that no matter how long Google spends trying to make their cars safer and safer (and apparently it is already significantly safer than a human) one day their car is going to have a serious accident. Maybe it is not even the car's fault, and some grandma has a heart attack and smashes into the side of it and dies. It doesn't matter, at that point the thing that will decide whether there is a massive backlash against the cars or not is going to be who can spin the story the best. On one side you'll have professional drivers, non-driverless car makers and a sensationalist media who will jump all over the story, showing pictures of granny's sobbing family and Sergey climbing out of his private jet. On the other side Google will probably wheel out some geeks with terrible communication skills trying to explain the numbers. They will lose, set back the acceptance of the cars for a decade, and not understand at all why.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has learnt a lot about how much of the non-tech world is both ignorant and irrational (remember the whole battery fire thing). What he will be betting on is that by the time his car has a minor accident he will be able to turn up on TV and say how Tesla drivers have used the autopilot for whatever millions of miles and this is the first incident. He will probably have a few canned stories lined up about Sarah the housewife who's toddler was saved from being involved in an accident by the feature. He will fight the PR battle and eventually the media will move onto the next story and subsequent driverless car crashes will get less and less airtime. This will pave the way for the widespread adoption of them. Ultimately the biggest beneficiary of this will probably be Google as it will make it easier for them to bring their undoubtedly far superior technology into the real world. Unless, of course, Musk has gambled too big, and the cars kill a bunch of people due to a software bug.
I think that we're both "decades away" and "just around the corner" for autonomous vehicles. They'll probably be expensive but vehicles that can drive themselves on freeways/major highways are probably just around the corner. However once they're on the side roads they've have to switch back to manual mode. Vehicles that can handle all of the intricacies of side roads (pedestrians, pets, poor maintenance, contrived intersections, lack of centerlines/markings, etc) will require lots of additional programming.
combine this story about wireless EV charging autonomous cars and a crazy software developer and i wonder how long it will be before someone programs their autonomous car to drive them around in an infinite loop after they die...or at least until the car breaks down.
Other industries will try to push back against them such as municipalities who earn income through traffic enforcement, and insurance companies who make big money on point surcharges.
Self driving cars will likely change our relationship with our cars as much as media on demand has with our TV. When we drive somewhere in the city, the car drops as off, looks for parking on it own, and can just keep driving around if nothing is found. Heck, if are going for the day, why pay $35 when it can drive to a further cheaper lot, or even just drive back home. Instead of walking to where we park the car, we will be able to call our car to us. If we need to take something over to a friend, we can have our car bring it without us going for the ride.
What if they made our cars better designed to sleep in? Go to bed in city, wake up in another. Planes suddenly only become attractive if you need to go outside your watch your evening TV and then sleep all night radius.
Not to mention, that self driving cars will very rarely commit traffic violations (speeding, etc). That will dry up a major revenue source for a lot of smaller towns, another billion dollar industry.
Well, when you are retired you can drive around when no one else is on the road and actually have fun. For most of us, the bulk of our driving is our commute in traffic, and it sucks.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Flying cars would also be disruptive, it doesn't mean it'll happen any time soon. Maybe it'll get approval to run on a few well painted, well lit, pre-approved roads in sunny California during daytime genuinely by itself, but from there to an all-road, all-condition vehicle that people can actually use as a full substitute for driving themselves will take many, many years. It's a long step from a test drive with humans that can take over to saying we're confident this can drive by itself, take the back seat and enjoy the ride. A really long step.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
people say this a lot. Got any data on that. And citation if you will.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
capitalism will find a way.
Maybe but capitalists don't solve technical problems; engineers do.
As as aside, the writer states that because Tesla's tech is evolutionary in nature, and this "problem" clearly requires a revolutionary approach, that means it's going to happen quickly. To use [what's bound to be a terrible analogy], just because it'd take forever to come up with a neon-green German Shepherd through selective breeding does *not* mean we'll be seeing genetically-engineered custom-colored dogs on the market within the next five years, even if it's currently do-able (and I'm not sure that fully-autonomous cars are currently even do-able, at least not in a fashion that society will be willing to accept) .
Which is a reason more advanced societies don't allow for such a ridiculous conflict of interests.
You sir are clearly a danger to everyone and need to be replaced by a robot. One with a big grin of course.
Actually, when self driving cars become reality, the last thing you will want is to actually own one. The biggest problem I see is in that the cars will be able to be remotely disabled. The privacy and software security implications are ginormous. Deviatons from privacy and the hacking concerns will make all the current hacker's issues look like spilt milk.
When discussing cars, slashdot needs to compare them as animals?
What would be wrong with restricting a driverless taxi service to only certain roadways that have been configured to support them (if required)? You could just start with suitable inner city CBD areas, and build out the capacity with a combination of roadway improvements and upgrades to the car so that it can service larger and larger areas. Similarly, the first automated truck systems could just travel between terminals at the ends of motorways (which are already well formed). Human truck drivers could pick up the trailers at these points and complete the local deliveries.
But sure, a driverless car that you can dump on a country road in Scotland and expect to find its way into central London is a long way off. However, I don't think we need that to get the bulk of the benefits from the technology.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised if what happens is that driverless vehicles cut automotive related injuries so much that people become outraged that governments are not upgrading more roads to support them. Think of the children and all that.
Not to mention, that self driving cars will very rarely commit traffic violations (speeding, etc). That will dry up a major revenue source for a lot of smaller towns, another billion dollar industry.
Actually, at first, you'll see the reverse:
Oh, that car in the next lane is driverless - so you know it's safe to cut it off. Stopping at a stop sign and the car to your right is driverless: you know it's safe to go ahead of it. etc.. Driverless cars will start uploading driving violation videos to you tube or some police agency, cities wanting their cut, will start writing tickets as fast as possible based on these videos. Very quickly, drivers will start behaving - but road death rates for the human drivers will still be disproportionately higher. Soccer moms will very quickly use peer pressure to eliminate drivers. Maybe it'll get to the point where, on bad weather days, the roads will be empty.
Also, with all these electric cars driving themselves, owned by some fleet service, what's going to happen to the $50 billion auto service industry?
Seriously, stop listening to these cretins. They give you fairy-tales and other stupid stuff they believe in. They do not give anything of any worth, but drown out people with an actual clue of what is possible and what not and how long things can be expected to take.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They're entirely different kinds of electric cars, altogether.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
> We are talking a billion dollar industry there
Uber is already near $11 Billion in bookings.
http://www.inquisitr.com/2358989/uber-on-its-way-to-reaching-almost-11-billion-in-bookings-in-2015/
people say this a lot. Got any data on that. And citation if you will.
Just for speeding tickets: 6 billion dollars: http://www.statisticbrain.com/... An average of $152 seems a bit low to me.
If you look at parking meters in San Francisco http://priceonomics.com/san-fr... you'll see they get about $50 million for paid parking, and get $80 Million in parking violations per year.
It's been 24 hours since the last Tesla story!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Car moving forward should have three modes:
1) autopilot - the user need do nothing except enter destination/route and the user can be anywhere in the car, liability for accidents etc is the car manufacture
2) accident avoidance - the user is in control, but the car will not allow an accident to happen, liability for accidents etc is the car manufacture
3) manual - user is in complete control and can do damage, liability for accidents etc is the current driver
This allows for those that want to drive, to be able to drive but also has the advantage of lower accident rates and even allows for people to sleep, read and/or TXT.
I love that Tesla is pushing it forward and being loud (mistakes will happen without a doubt), Google (and others only autonomous vehicles) will have there place in taxi service, semi-trucks, etc) but for a majority the Three Modes vehicles will be a majority.
PS DUI's go away, distracted driving (TXTing, reading, eating, putting on makeup) issues go away, accidents are reduced dramatically (but will never be perfect).
That, and capitalists create at least as many issues as they solve, and the adoption of their 'solutions' often depend on who has the best PR spin and not the actual best solution for the most people.
In fact, capitalists as a rule only offer solutions to problems if they benefit the capitalist. Otherwise they're perfectly content to let the problem exist, especially if there's profit in exploiting the problem.
The notion that capitalism and 'the market' can solve serious problems optimally would be laughable if so many fools didn't believe it.
The speeding ticket link is not loading. I assume that is for the whole US. And as for San Francisco, 80M sounds like a lot, but for a city of that size it a line item. 6B for a nation (~300B month just for the Fed + local government) is so small you may as well worry about the lack of tax from buggy whip manufactures.
Sure it a lot of money on its own. But in the bigger scheme of things it just isn't.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I think this will come eventually. I suspect the solution will involve lots of radar, forwards and backwards, along with several pairs of 3d cameras. The problem with lidar is that it doesn't work in snow or heavy rain. Humans drive based on 3d vision, so why not have computers do it. Problems could arise if the cameras get blocked, but the same think can happen to human drivers. If there are multiple pairs of cameras, perhaps with mechanisms to clear their own view to the outside, they could be quite reliable. If one combines this with radar, one could have a computer with a fairly good picture of the outside world.
I know google's car uses a combination of lidar and video. I think it is 2d video, but I'm not sure. Their car probably uses lidar to find objects around the car. The video system then probably uses neural nets to identify what the object is. It can also likely tell whether the objects are moving or not. I suspect that there is research in the pipeline that uses neural networks that have been so successful at 2d image classification to work with 3d stereoscopic imagery. Google "3d computer vision with neural networks" to see that this is being thought about. I suspect that it would be a useful avenue to train the neural networks not just by feeding the networks pixels from the cameras, but also by feeding it the readings from radar and sonar sensors.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Tesla autopilot is the roomba of self driving cars. It's enough to generate interest in self driving cars and will spur more development till we have something more intelligent.The roomba would blindly go in circles but now we have vacuum cleaners that scan the room and create optimal paths.
It's a step in the correct direction.
and the other is just another overhyped soundbite from Musky?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A third approach is to have a robot independent of the vehicle which can drive it, and presumably can switch from one vehicle to another. The best example of this I'm aware of is Yamaha's motobot which is capable of riding a motorcycle on a track. I'm not sure how much of the article is speculation rather than existing capability. http://pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/39534/news/this-yamaha-robot-can-drive-a-motorcyle
Except why would any company with a driverless car SELL it, when they can lease it to Uber/Lyft and force them to pay them a fixed monthly fee AND a slice of the revenue. Further, they'll want to lease the cars because they'll eventually get sued if the cars malfunction. I myself do not fear driverless cars, I fear 10 year old driverless cars that haven't been maintained.
And yes I do work at an auto company.
And these JohnnyCabs won't have to be able to go everywhere.
If they can just navigate between the airport and all the hotels in the city, that alone would be able to kill the taxi business.