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Self-Driving Cars Should Be Legal Because They Pass Safety Tests, Argues Google (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article on The Verge: Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car project, has sent a letter to US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today with a plan for selling autonomous vehicles that have no steering wheels or pedals. The plan appears to be pretty straightforward: Urmson argues that if a self-driving car can pass standardized federal safety tests, they should be road-legal. Urmson adds that regulators could 'set conditions that limit use based on safety concerns.'
We can't write a 100% working OS for a phone. Please trust our software with your life.
..and lots of them have been proven later to be unsafe anyway. The law cannot account for everything.
Any ordinary car driven by a raging retarded monkey would pass the safety tests as well.
BECAUSE THE SAFETY TESTS ON CARS DOESN'T TEST DRIVING OR COGNITIVE SKILLS!!!!
There are plenty of computers in use (a lot of the better ones are running Linux or an RTOS and hell, even Windows NT/CE/XP) that people trust their lives to implicitly on a daily basis in a lot more delicate situations than driving a car. Commercial planes do most of the flying fully autonomous, most of both your debt and savings is being invested fully automated, any machine in a hospital parses a lot more data than a few dozen sensor and requires much more precision.
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Have you seen a commercial plane without human pilots ? I thought so.
That's not the point. The computers on board a commercial plane have the potential to cause major accidents that the pilots would be unable to prevent. And still we trust them.
Oh, I love this game! The Luddites bring it up every time autonomous cars are discussed.
How will a computer respond to a tire blow out on the highway at 60mph plus? Some other emergency?
Within a few milliseconds of the emergency being detected by sensors, the computer will have fully assessed the situation and determined the safest course of action. A blown tire is simple, because it only really affects the vehicle handling parameters. At over 60MPH on a highway, the vehicle is going to have very minimal handling needs. The steering system can be told (within those milliseconds) that it will need to adjust, and in a few rotations of the tire, it can analyse the shape of effects of the new tire's shape. At minimum, it will know that it needs to steer a few degrees to the side of its intended course, allowing it to stay on course and maneuver safely to the shoulder.
How will the car that gets slammed into by an autonomous vehicle with a blown tire respond?
If by some absurd accident that does occur, it'd be treated like any other unavoided collision. As soon as the vehicle determines that a collision is unavoidable, it will attempt to minimize the damage. There has been research into having algorithms adjust the vehicle speed to change impact position, relying on a database of the vehicle's crush characteristics to reduce the chance of injury. Results show that the computer can do that faster and more successfully than any human driver.
How will the cars behind it react to the event in front? How fast?
When the front car detects the blowout, or when the cars behind it detect the debris or change in driving characteristics, they will consider the car to be a risk, and avoid it. They will start slowing down, changing lanes, and otherwise avoiding the affected vehicle. Again, this has all been tested.
As for the speed of this decision, everything happens in a few dozen milliseconds. At 60MPH highway speeds, that means that the computer will process and understand a situation before the vehicle has traveled a few feet. In comparison, a human brain reacts in about 150 to 250 ms, depending mostly on the type of stimulus. It doesn't matter how good of a driver you are, or how much attention you're paying to what's going on. An autonomous vehicle can observe, consider, and begin reacting to an emergency in front of it before your brain can even understand what your eyes are seeing.
What will happen to the hacker that intercepted and manipulated those signals the other cars are sending to each other? ( assumption made )
Oh, don't be so coy. You've made an awful lot of assumptions without actually understanding the current state of the art.
Legally, probably nothing will happen to the hacker, because it'd be difficult to find and catch such an attack, but that has nothing to do with the cars. It's equally hard to find someone using a cell phone jammer today. There have been a few cases, but they were caught due to prolonged or repeated use.
From the perspective of the cars on the road, losing communications with the other vehicles is a known and tested risk. Similarly, mismatched information is a risk condition. The easiest response is to slow down and try to move out of traffic.
Has any of these scenarios been tested? I don't see any crushed google cars so I am going to guess NONE.
Yes, these scenarios have been tested extensively, but you don't know about it, because you're not bothering to do research. One of the fascinating aspects of robotics research is that researchers can control all of the inputs to the algorithms. We can put a sensor in a tire, then drive it down a test track and make it blow. We can take that data, mix it with data from a dozen other test runs, and use that to build thousands of simulation input cases. Those inputs are run in simulated environments, with and without vehicle-to-vehicle
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Look up TCAS sometime. The planes have sensors to detect each other. If the TCAS system detects a possible collision situation, the planes determine, all by themselves, the correct course of action, and then relay that information to the pilot. Commands like CLIMB or DESCEND or STAY LEVEL. In this situation, the pilot has absolutely no say in the matter. They are required to obey the computer because in the past, pilots ignoring this input have cause planes to crash into each other in mid-air because the pilot thought he knew better. The TCAS commands even override Air Traffic Control commands. How's that for trusting your life to a computer?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Not in the UK. Maybe Google should try having one of their cars pass the test over here.
== Jez ==
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