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MIT Invented a Tool That Allows Driverless Cars To Navigate Rural Roads Without a Map (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) is developing new technology, called MapLite, that eliminates the need for maps in self-driving car technology altogether. This could more easily enable a fleet-sharing model that connects carless rural residents and would facilitate intercity trips that run through rural areas. In a paper posted online on May 7 by CSAIL and project partner Toyota, 30-year-old PhD candidate Teddy Ort -- along with co-authors Liam Paull and Daniela Rus -- detail how using LIDAR (a radar-like sensor that uses lasers instead of radio waves to measure distances) and GPS together can enable self-driving cars to navigate on rural roads without having a detailed map to guide them. The team was able to drive down a number of unpaved roads in rural Massachusetts and reliably scan the road for curves and obstacles up to 100 feet ahead, according to the paper.
Pretty much everything a computer does we can do. We program them to do it. There are plenty of things that computers can do faster and better though. Hopefully self driving cars becomes on of those. If you donâ(TM)t think self driving cars are worth it, you arenâ(TM)t thinking big enough. Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park. Thatâ(TM)s the type of thing that is possible once we have self driving cars. Not to mention the price of a taxi drops considerably as does the cost of shipped goods. There are likely tons of spin off technologies we havenâ(TM)t even imagined yet that will become possible and cost effective once we have self driving vehicles.