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Inside Google's Self-Driving Car Test Center (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Steven Levy reports on his trip to the facility where Google tests is autonomous vehicles (here's a map). The company apparently has a four-week program to certify people to not-drive these cars, and they gave Levy an abbreviated version of it. "The most valuable tool the test team has for making sure things are running smoothly is the laptop on the co-driver's lap. Using an interface called x_view, the laptop shows the world as the car sees it, a wireframe representation of the area that depicts all the objects around the car: pedestrians, trees, road signs, other cars, motorcycles—basically everything picked up by the car's radar and laser sensors.
X_view also shows how the car is planning to deal with conditions, mainly through a series of grid-like "fences" that depict when the car intends to stop, cautiously yield, or proceed past a hazard. It also displays the car's path. If the co-driver sees a discrepancy between x_view and the real world, that's reason to disengage. ... At the end of the shift, the entire log is sent off to an independent triage team, which runs simulations to see what would have happened had the car continued autonomously. In fact, even though Google's cars have autonomously driven more than 1.3 million miles—routinely logging 10,000 to 15,000 more every week—they have been tested many times more in software, where it's possible to model 3 million miles of driving in a single day."
X_view also shows how the car is planning to deal with conditions, mainly through a series of grid-like "fences" that depict when the car intends to stop, cautiously yield, or proceed past a hazard. It also displays the car's path. If the co-driver sees a discrepancy between x_view and the real world, that's reason to disengage. ... At the end of the shift, the entire log is sent off to an independent triage team, which runs simulations to see what would have happened had the car continued autonomously. In fact, even though Google's cars have autonomously driven more than 1.3 million miles—routinely logging 10,000 to 15,000 more every week—they have been tested many times more in software, where it's possible to model 3 million miles of driving in a single day."
it's not bigger on the inside. :(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Why doesn't medium.com just buy Slashdot and get it over with?
and what about the prison / jail time when the car runs though the framers market?
Is it fair to say these cars are currently safer than human drivers when a dedicated copilot is nearly always present and double checking on the cars and who then shuts it off for a human to take over at the slightest problem? How many accidents have been prevented?
For those of you that haven't seen the university of Michigan report
Self-driving car = Google
Driverless car = Everyone else
Google will be paying some accident victim millions of dollars in the future. It is inevitable.
... which will be covered by their insurance company ... the same insurance companies that are already paying millions to accident victims. The only thing that will change with SDCs, is that they will be paying a lot less.
SDCs don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than human drivers. That is not a high bar.
I will be surprised if Google's insurance company ever has to pay a claim. The cars will have so much data on the accident that it should be trivial to show that the car was obeying all the laws and that any accident was either impossible to avoid or the fault of someone else.
Google itself might pay in the case of an accident that was not their fault BUT has a PR issue attached to it.
But, overall, I think that the insurance companies will love the autonomous cars that they're insuring. It's free money for them.
In fact, even though Google's cars have autonomously driven more than 1.3 million miles—routinely logging 10,000 to 15,000 more every week—they have been tested many times more in software, where it's possible to model 3 million miles of driving in a single day."
That would be three million miles over the same few miles of well understood track and roads. The real world is much more varied than that.
Google revealed that their vehicles had been involved in 341 "disengagements" (when the driver had to take over) between September 2014 and October 2015. Of those "disengagements", 79.8% were due to a failure of the autonomous system.
Read the details here which outline the results of the report.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why would a car test center need to drive?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Again, it's naive to think that the cars driving software will be infallible, but most accidents are caused by the fallibility of human drivers. All Google needs to do to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars is be a little better than people, a goal which should not be hard to reach.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Airbus killed 20-30 people
So software killed a few dozen. Pilot error has killed thousands.
in TFA the car has to be taken off auto-drive because it comes to a construction area and slows down so much it was barely moving
these things are not going to work in this form, and pushing them into the market will be a disaster
car AI is much, much improved, and I can see groups of electric semi-trucks following one lead driver on an interstate, but that's about it
Thank you Dave Raggett