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Automated Cars Are Not Able To Use the Automated Car Wash (thetruthaboutcars.com)
schwit1 shares a report from The Truth About Cars: [T]he simple task of washing a self-driving car is far more complicated than one might expect, as anything other than meticulous hand washing a big no-no. Automated car washes could potentially dislodge expensive sensors, scratch them up, or leave behind soap residue or water spots that would affect a camera's ability to see. According to CNN, automakers and tech firms have come up with a myriad of solutions to this problem -- though a man with a rag and some water appears to be the most popular. Toyota, Aptiv, Drive.AI, May Mobility, and Uber have all said they use rubbing alcohol, water, or glass cleaner to manually wash the sensors, before carefully finishing the job with a microfiber cloth. While it's more than just a little ironic that these automated vehicles require gobs of attention and pampering from human hands just to function correctly, some companies are working on a way around it. General Motors' Cruise has said it will design and implement sensor-cleaning equipment in production vehicles.
For full self-driving you need some mechanism to clear the sensors if they get obscured. That usually means wipers for rain/snow and heaters for frost/snow.
Waymo seems to have developed something for their sensor package to operate in snow. Tesla only has heaters.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If it can't handle a car wash at low velocity that lasts a few minutes, how's it going to handle hours and hours of rain with entrained road grime at highway speeds?
they use rubbing alcohol, water, or glass cleaner to manually wash the sensors, before carefully finishing the job with a microfiber cloth.
Those people have never met snow or the salty sludge thrown around by passing cars.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
This vehicle has detected blocking of the LEFT FRONT UPPER optical sensor. This vehicle will now pull off the road in a safe location. Locate the OPTICAL sensor cleaning kit that was supplied to the registered owner of this vehicle and employ it in the method shown on the center console screen. Use of any cleaning product or method different from the specified product may invalidate your warranty. Have a nice day!
See! All these advances in technology just create new jobs in new places! How many "Washer of High Tech Car" jobs were there 20 years ago? None!
Wifi Antenna Cleaner?
Robot repair?
Laser lens deduster?
3D Printer Nozzle Declogger?
I could go on. Relax you all.
Do Teslas have this problem now? I remember when you use to have to put down your exterior antenna before going into a car wash. Yes, many of the current under-development cars have this problem. Once self driving cars really arrive there maybe a short period where you have to cover some special equipment in some cases for some brands -- but quite quickly the cars will evolve to not need this or car washes will evolve to accommodate. To propose this is the thing that will prevent adoption is foolish (or wishful thinking) which I think is part of the suggestion behind this posting.
Letter To Iran
Who's going to wipe the mud of everything?
Most likely the vehicle owner will hose it off periodically, which is good enough. I have had my minivan for 19 years. This is the number of times I have take it to a carwash: 0.
While going to work on an interstate in slushy weather, I was driving 65 in the fast lane which was separated from the oncoming lanes by a concrete barrier above headlight level. A truck in the oncoming lane hit a slush puddle and sent a wall of black slush over the barrier. It fully covered my windshield and side window. I couldn't see anything other than the fact that the car behind me got plastered too. So he couldn't see me either. I couldn't put my brakes on. I had to pray the car in front of me didn't stop, turn wipers and wash on, and wait to see again. It was a long few seconds. These things will happen.
A sensor could avoid being blinded in the same situation if it had something like eyelids with similar reflexes and speed.
The sensor processing should have a parallel path that does nothing but detect things coming at the sensor and send a signal to close the lid at just the right moment to block most of the debris. That combined with new technology to make the sensor windows hydrophobic should go a long way to keep them clean.
Redundancy is also important. I personally think they should explore audio sensing to augment the visual. It is cheap and can warn about threats that are out of sight. I prefer driving with my windows down in city environments because the noises give me a good 3D map of the traffic without taking my eyes from the road in front.
I have to clear the lens of my backup camera of road salt residue once or twice a week at this time of year where I live, otherwise everything looks like a big whitewashed blur.
I deal with Lidars a lot, on self-driving loaders in an underground mining environment. It's pretty much the worst place for them - dusty, wet, hot, lots of vibration, you name it. Even though they are sealed to IP67, with o-rings on sealing surfaces & etc, they get water in them on a regular basis - IP67 is no match for even the mild pressure from a garden hose, let alone a pressure cleaner. The recommendation from the manufacturer is to send them back to the factory when they get wet, we generally take them apart and dry them out because a visit to the factory costs upwards of $5,000 (and six weeks delay) for an $10,000 device.
They mostly need to be cleaned about once a shift if the conditions are average. They need to be cleaned hourly if conditions are terrible. Failure to clean them gives us missing portions of scans if a mud splatter hits the lens, or a general loss of distance if it's just grime. Both of those things upset the self-driving software eventually, and then it's tedious manual control until someone can go clean it.
A dirty lens used to give us a "pollution error", but we changed the settings in the firmware of the lidars to turn that function off because we were sick of regular halts for errors that had yet to make an impact on the machine's operation. That is, what the manufacturer thinks is a critical pollution fault is actually about halfway to being unusable.
Lenses on our machines typically last about a couple of thousand hours of operation - probably a year or so if you translate that to a passenger vehicle. And of course, when cleaning them the instructions say to use a mild detergent and a clean, lint free cloth, gently buffing to a sparkling result. In reality, that is usually windex (or contact cleaner if there's grease on the lens) and any sort of material that can be found to wipe it with - paper towel, the sleeve of your shirt, a thumb, etc. Needless to say, this generally transforms the finely polished plastic lenses into a hazy scratched mess fairly quickly, especially if people spray and then wipe the lens without actually rinsing the crud off. So expect this to happen to consumer gear as well. And you can't just directly hose them, because hey, they aren't that waterproof either.
As long as there's plastic lenses in use, there's not really much manufacturers can do about this, other than have a secondary, cheap, external covering that can be unclipped and swapped out quickly. Or something like peel-off stickers like motorbike riders have for their helmets. They could shift to proper glass lenses, but even though they'd be much more durable, they would also be much more expensive to make.
(And what's going on with your backend, Slashdot? Heaps of timeouts and errors today.)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
That's easily solved. Most people never run out of fuel, because there's a gauge to tell them that they need to fill it up. If cars had an idiot light that says "Refill wiper fluid now" that goes on when it is at the 25% mark, nobody would run out of wiper fluid, either. Car companies don't add that sensor that because wiper fluid isn't a critical safety feature. If it becomes one, they presumably will do so.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
High class AI cars obviously can only be washed in high class AI car washes.
New business opportunities.
Also, since in the future you'll hail such a car with your phone for a ride, you will care just as much where it gets washed as the Uber car you use now.