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Tesla's Sales Increase - But Next Will We Need Smart Roads? (backchannel.com)
Elon Musk says Tesla's autopilot has now driven over 222 million miles, and the company is now selling twice as many electric cars as it did in 2015. (Despite complaints from a coal-mining CEO that Tesla "is a fraud" because it receives tax-payer subsidies.)
But Slashdot reader mirandakatz writes, "It's not enough to build self-driving cars: we have to build the roads to accompany them. Roadside sensors might have once seemed a pipe dream, but with the advent of 5G internet infrastructure, they're not out of reach at all. And their implications span far beyond road safety, GMU researcher Brent Skorup explains at Backchannel: Cities could use sensor data for conducting traffic studies, pushing out real-time public bus alerts, increasing parking space occupancy, metering commercial loading times to prevent congestion, and enhancing pedestrian safety. There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
But Slashdot reader mirandakatz writes, "It's not enough to build self-driving cars: we have to build the roads to accompany them. Roadside sensors might have once seemed a pipe dream, but with the advent of 5G internet infrastructure, they're not out of reach at all. And their implications span far beyond road safety, GMU researcher Brent Skorup explains at Backchannel: Cities could use sensor data for conducting traffic studies, pushing out real-time public bus alerts, increasing parking space occupancy, metering commercial loading times to prevent congestion, and enhancing pedestrian safety. There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors.
How about you fuck off and die. Not everything needs to be used to deliver more ads to me.
Time to offend someone
How are we going to afford smart roads when we can't even consistently fix the potholes we've already got?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Those "smart roads" don't sound expensive at all!
More seriously - the bits which don't involve monetizing me can pretty much already be accomplished through existing crowd-sourced data collection techniques. Heck, most of the bits that *do* involve monetizing me can also pretty much already be accomplished via those same techniques. But then, somebody wouldn't stand to make millions from the patent portfolio they've built based on their publicly-funded research.
#DeleteChrome
Smart roads are neither necessary nor sufficient to realize driverless cars. They are unnecessary, because imaging technology is increasing at a nice clip, obviating their need. All of the applications addressed in the article could be realized with smart cars communicating with each other, rather than smart roadside sensors communicating from the street.
Further, road sensors won't be sufficient, because even assuming the cost of these smart sensors becomes relatively inexpensive, there are simply too many less traveled roads to install them on. There are many millions of miles of unpaved dirt roads, newly constructed roads, and roads that are damaged by nature. Cars will need to drive effectively without roadside sensors.
The one application I can see of roadside sensors is possibly to increase accuracy on major highways, thus increasing the max speed of the driverless cars on the road.
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"There are also commercial applications for sensor data: How many cars drive by a billboard? How many people walk by a storefront per day? How many of those people have dogs? These are all questions we could easily answer with roadside sensors."
First of all, the last thing we need is more effective advertising. Second we don't need any new information gathering devices created and installed in our current political climate. If installed today these sensors wouldn't just track anonymous data, they would also track WHO did the walking and what car drove by. Today they'd build those capabilities in and probably lie about it. Even without building that capability into the system you could find the paths of sensors and correlate with GPS data to determine not only where my car went but whether or not I drove it.
It's only a matter of time before they say my car (which I say is lost and they fished out of the river) going to my office, combined with my gps signal and phone (which I conveniently say I lost) along with those of my wife is proof I killed her. There is a small chance any one of those could be a coincidence but the probability of all of the above being a coincidence exceeds any reasonable doubt! Little did I know I forgot my phone that day, my wife noticed and was bringing it to me when stopped at a gas station and was murdered by a mugger who disposed of the body and car in the river.
The only improbable thing there is actually my wife getting mugged and killed, the rest is actually a pretty normal occurance. No thank you. This is why the last thing you should ever want is the police to have more data.
My subject is perhaps a bit strong; there's nothing inherently wrong with smart roads. The problem is with the idea that you need them. If you need smart roads for your autonomous vehicles to function, then you haven't solved the autonomous driving problem for two critical reasons. One, what if the smart roads fail? Two, what if the smart roads are hacked? It is absolutely critical that vehicles use smart road (or indeed, V2V) data for informational purposes only. They will always have to trust their sensors above anything else they are being told for these two reasons.
Automakers will collect information from autonomous driving systems, process it, and then send it back to vehicles. At least some of them are even going to share this data with one another so they won't have to generate all of it themselves. But the vehicles will still have to make the ultimate call, because if we here at Slashdot should know anything it's that you can't trust your input. On the vehicle itself you can solve this problem by cross-checking multiple sensors. The result is always going to have to be more trusted than what the network is claiming.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How are we going to afford smart roads when we can't even consistently fix the potholes we've already got?
the rich people in your community have successfully brainwashed you. they have plenty of money, more than enough to fix the potholes and educate our kids. they have manipulated the mechanisms of society so that you think that it's your fault.
My guess is this. The INITIAL 4G spec mandated IPv6 connectivity. However, carriers went ahead and started "marketing" their products and services as "4G" without this (and other parts of the spec) before the spec was finalized. Most likely, 5G will have an instated mandate for IPv6, which helps with individually addressing each of these internet connected devices. One of the proposals for these sensors were to place them within the lane line bumps on the road, but no idea what they intended to do to power these though.
That we can do something does not mean that we automatically should do it & it looks to me like this is a solution in search of a problem that would propose financing to install it.
GPS/4G linked databases of road limits and mapping software already performs localization to follow traffic congestion and speeds.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
You mean to tell me that you're going to have millions of vehicles with umpteen sensors, and millions more with passengers that are cataloging every speed fluctuation and bump in the road - all of which can be used for road maintenance and optimization, but we're going to ignore all of that data so we can put into place and maintain a complete second system? All of the civic uses can pretty much be gathered using anonymized cell phone and car data. Fuck the commercial stuff.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Are we developing autonomous cars or not? If a car needs a smart road or even a network connection it is not autonomous. I can tell you there is no way in hell my city would ever be able to afford smart roads. They can't even keep the lines painted!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
But don't you see? Advertisers will fund them!
Yep, I see your point.
Still I agree with the parent: extensive research (from Google and others) agrees that the most usefull place to put the sensors into is the car.
(The logic goes :
- automated cars needs very fine details.
- we don't have such highly detailed maps already
- we should makes some, but it's going to be very cumbersome and time-and-ressource-consuming to detail all the raods in every excruciatingly tiny detail (nearly down to the position of every orange street cone)
- hey! why don't we crowdsource the data? let's have our cars equipped with good enough sensors and stream their data to us and so we can continuously update the maps.
- hey! if the cars' sensors are good enough to see every last orange street cone, why the hell do we need to upload the data and update the maps ? Let the car maps itself what it sees in its vicinity.
- So basically, you need plain fucking simple street maps to have a vague idea in which general direction you want to go, and let's have highly sensitive/detailed sensors on the car to continuously see and analyse what's in the imediate vicinity of the car and react accordingly ?)
From that point of view, trying to trick the advertisers into funding more smart streets is nearly useless. Better find a way to monetise the car it self and put more sensors on it.
Hey! Maybe advertisers will pay us to drive!!
Now that's more interesting to me. :-D
Specially if I can manage to find a Google Car/Telsa/whatever port of uBlock Origin !
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