Automobiles Evolve to Live Up to Their Name 297
MauriceV sent in a story about the trend toward the completely self-driving car.
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Automobiles Evolve to Live Up to Their Name
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"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
Could be good for safety (Score:5, Insightful)
Happy Trails!
Erick
What does this mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
the technology needs to be made fool proof before it can be set loose on the roads.
Control (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, aeroplanes have been doing it for years - changing public opinion is going to be difficult.
Besides, most men prefer the control they have while driving
Re:What does this mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What does this mean? (Score:1, Insightful)
Excuse me, but electronics can react MUCH MUCH more faster than a human ever could.
Why do you think the space shuttle uses electronic guidance to land?
Re:What does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Superman is that you? Loads of machines adjust faster then me about every computer known to man can react faster than I can. As for the technology needing to be foolproof before it can be set loose on the road what about all the accidents and deaths caused by 'foolproof' drivers not paying sufficient attention or doing dumb things like speeding and insane overtaking manouvers.
Re:What does this mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
Road support for robot cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
To get really tin-foil-hattish about it, I imagine once self-driving automobile technology is perfected it will be really, really safe. Really safe. To the point where there will be so few accidents that it will result in insurance companies having to lower premiums drastically. To the point where they won't be able to rake in the dough like they do now on auto insurance. My hat is telling me these companies will work behind the scenes to prevent this technology from maturing any time "soon". Once it gets to the point of being usable and practical they will attempt to buy legistlation that outlaws it. In the U.S. anyway. Like I said, I don't expect any of this for another 40 years or so, and by then the techniques of hyper-lobbying (read: legal bribery) will have advanced to the point where today's legislation purchasers (MS, Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, etc.) will look like pikers by comparison.
What pisses me off (sometimes) is all this stuff we were promised as kids. Well, where is it? I don't see any of it.
Re:What does this mean? (Score:3, Insightful)
A human being can see the car running the red light at an intersection. The radar-based system wouldn't even know about the other car until right before it sideswiped you (if they even bothered to mount a lateral detector).
A human being knows whether its safer to swerve into the lefthand lane or off the road.
A human being can hear someone else honking his horn.
A human being can see a "Deaf Child" sign.
A human being can tell whether the road is wet.
There are many things electronic systems can do well, and some that they can do better than humans. The safety advantages of automated driving may outweigh the disadvantages, but that doesn't mean the disadvantages don't exist.
Re:Screensavers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to wait untill every road in the country is retrofitted with magnetic spikes to have my car drive me around. By the time that happens that tech will be obsolete anyway. Also, that kind of "smart road" is actually realy dumb... imagine the mayhem if a malicious prankster dug up the magnets and moved them.
Re:The sensors aren't good enough yet (Score:3, Insightful)
And not just obstacle avoidance, but sometimes choosing which obstacle to avoid.
Can we make the computer smart enough to avoid the child, even though it will hit something else, like the skateboard or dog he is chasing?
If the computer mandates a minimum 1 meter bubble with other cars, do we allow it to violate that in order to avoid the kid and dog?
It's clear that the problem can be fixed, but the market isn't there yet to do it.
I'm not so sure that is is clear that it can be fixed for other than limited access freeways. Maybe not even then.
Re:What does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, I'll tell you what... do you have a car with cruise control? Next time you're on the highway, set it, and watch how closely it's sticking to the set speed, even when you go around bends in the road, up and down hills, etc. Now try staying that close to one speed without the cruise control...
The cruise control operates by measuring the actual speed, comparing it to the desired speed, and controlling the throttle. It can react to small changes in speed MUCH faster than you can.
If you gave it some kind of sensor to anticipate slope changes before they happen (laser range finders perhaps?), then it would be almost perfect.
Re:Low adoption: AutoAuto == sunday driver (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Closing the sunroof? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What does this mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
A fully autonomous system damn well better have a 360 degree field of vision. That said, it still could miss the car running the red light if that car is screened until it pops out a lane to pass the guy who DID stop... but a human would most likely fail to spot them as well.
Advantage: Computer, because it doesn't have to turn its head to look.
A human being knows whether its safer to swerve into the lefthand lane or off the road.
Agreed, but not all humans pay attention closely enough, or at least not all the time. I know when I drive I always keep an eye out for which side has free space should I suddenly need it. Then if something DOES happen, I don't have to waste that fraction of a second looking around before making a move. Joe Cellphone probably isn't doing that.
Advantage: Human, under ideal circumstances. The best workaround for this is to not let the computer tailgate in the first place. It's probably a wash against real drivers in real conditions.
A human being can hear someone else honking his horn.
Computers can hear too, and parsing a honk is much simpler than parsing speech. Most of the car horns I hear on the road aren't directed at me, and the few that are have a variety of meanings. Could be a buddy in the next lane, could be someone telling me I left my turn signal on, could be someone is mortally offended by the bird shit on my car. If the computer can't figure it out, it could always ask the driver.
Advantage: none really. If the computer can't figure out how to respond, it will have made such a determination long before the human has had a chance to figure things out. At the very least, it'd be nice if the car automagically lowers the volume of the radio when people start honking.
A human being can see a "Deaf Child" sign.
ID tags or beacons can be placed under or near roads to serve as electronic signs for the car. They could even be mounted to the same poles as the human-readable signs just to keep things neat. Sure they don't exist now, but it's hardly a technology problem. Even simpler, we could just paint barcodes right on the street, which the car scans as it rolls by. Paint them in infrared and the humans don't even have to deal with them.
Advantage: none. Both human and computer should be able to figure out where they are and what they are supposed to be doing, if appropriate markings are in place.
A human being can tell whether the road is wet.
So can electronics. Detecting water is something they're reasonably good at. A diligent monitoring of ground and weather conditions could even keep the car watching out for black ice, which tends to sneak up on even the best drivers.
Advantage: Computer. A human in a heated cockpit simply will not know when they go from a road warm enough to maintain rain or slush to a road cold enough to sustain ice. Even without an autopilot, a friendly warning that icing conditions are present would help an awful lot of people.
Mal-2
Potential use: traffic jams (Score:3, Insightful)
A car that could keep a speed as constant as possible, instead of advancing in fits and jerks, would help all traffic more fluidly.
With the sensors they have, this should be easy enough. And if they can't do that, I don't think we should trust those companies to program cars to move without your intervention when you're going 100km/h.
Re:lawyers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I hate human drivers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Car Ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we all love our cars, but we build way too many of them. Most of them sit parked 90% of the time. A fully automatic car could come to us when we need it. With just a fraction of the cars we have now, a car could reach anyone in under a few minutes. You would just push a button and get a fully fueled and serviced SUV or compact as needed
Re:What does this mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm... the cruise control on my 2002 Honda Accord is pretty lame, actually. It generally sticks within +/- 3 MPH, but I can do much better if I am controlling it myself.
The part that sucks is that sometimes the cruise control decides to gun the engine when going up a hill. It's unacceptable for a human driver to spike the tachometer to 4500 RPM near the top of the hill just because he's 5 MPH under his desired speed.
Of course, as you point out, the human has more information to work with than the car. Still, I think the grand-parent post has a point: Real Life is notorious for finding unanticipated circumstances to throw at "autonomous" devices.
One day machines will exceed human performance, but it's going to be a long road (pardon the pun). It's not just a matter of having faster reflexes... it's a matter of having superior judgement and reasoning. If a situation starts to unfold on the interstate, how much time should be spent looking for escape paths? If you try breaking hard, will the driver behind you have time to react? Are you fscked already? If so, is there something you can do to minimize damage (e.g,. hit a car instead of a tractor trailer?).
What's going to be impossible is to have BOTH human drivers and machine drivers on the road at the same time. This is a lot more difficult than just having machine drivers, because it requires that machine drivers be able to interpret social cues (and perhaps even fake them). Can the machine analyze another driver's face and tell that they are distracted/tired/busy? How will right-of-way psychology unfold when one of the participants is non-digital? If you're waiting for the traffic signal at a shady intersection and you start to get a Bad Feeling about the thugs approaching the car, will it be smart enough to do a risk evaluation and run the red light?
There's a lot of stuff to think about and be addressed before this is viable...
Re:What does this mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a point, but... a computer is not "motivated" by *anything*. This is the part I never get about people who freak out at the idea of speed cameras: you'd rather have a human being come up behind you, run your plate, and then based on the type of car you're driving, what you look like, and whether anything interesting comes up there, decide whether or not to give you a speeding ticket... than making sure that *everyone* who is speeding gets one? (Which, by the way, is the fastest way to ensure we get good speeding laws...)
Same goes here. A computer is not motivated to tailgate the blue-hair in front of it because she's going "too slow." A computer is not motivated to cut the asshole in the Lexus off. A computer is not going to get in an accident because it was distraught over breaking up with its girlfriend.
But you have a point. We like revenge in our society. When someone hurts you, you want them to *pay*. If a computer hurts you, there's no way to make it pay... it doesn't care if you turn it into scrap.
Pretty lightweight article (Score:4, Insightful)
My prediction is within 10 years manufacturers will get beyond the toe-in-the-water stage and fully robotic cars will be approved for highway use. At some point someone will realize that a robotic car need not sit in the parking lot at work. It can drive home and chauffeur the rest of the family around, then return when it's quitting time. The saving on double car payments will far outweigh the cost of the additional trips.
The next step will be to ask why the car has to sit in the garage when it's not in use. Leasing companies will offer the use of their entire fleet of cars. Cars will become robot taxis, summoned by cell phone.
The next step after that will be to ban human-driven vehicles from the highways. When that's done, robotic cars will be able to travel at high speeds with less distance between them. Traffic jams will disappear. The annual highway death toll of 50,000 in America (consistent since the 1960's and half because of drunks) will plummet. I'm looking forward to all of this.
Some people don't think any of this will happen because people won't want to give up control of their cars. Driving a car is fun. Sure it, but so is riding a horse, and people gave that up when something better came along. Robotic cars are something better.
Re:The sensors aren't good enough yet (Score:3, Insightful)
This is driven by product liability issues, whereas a moment's thought would indicate that there is a net benefit to society even if the robot is only as unsafe as a human, since the driver can then be doing something productive rather than failing to observe stop signs, and picking his nose.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:3, Insightful)
In order to take 40% off your commute, unless your house and work are right on an onramp, you must be doing 60+% over the speed limit, and are able to sustain that in traffic. This means 112 MPH in a 70 zone.
I used to drive about 80 on the expressway in the 70 zone. I tried switching to 65. I found it made about 2 minutes difference on a 30 minute commute, because much of the commute time is taken up by sitting at stoplights, etc.
I also found that many of the assholes that were really being a danger on the road, driving really fast (20+MPH over the limit, weaving lanes a lot, etc) - quite often if they got off on the same ramp as me, they'd be like, 2 cars in front of me 10 minutes after they passed me. Big deal.
Part of the social contract of using the road is to respect the fact that you're in control of a lethal weapon, and the rules are there to protect everyone. If you're not willing to live within the rules, you need to take alternative steps, like moving closer to work. Either that, or you can petition to have the laws changed. Those are your choices.