Blind Man Test Drives Google's Autonomous Car 273
Velcroman1 writes "'This is some of the best driving I've ever done,' Steve Mahan said the other day. Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack. He also happens to be 95 percent blind. Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, 'drove' along a specially programmed route thanks to Google's autonomous driving technology. Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient — and clearly more accessible. In a Wednesday afternoon post on Google+, the company noted that it has hundreds of thousands of miles of testing under its belt, letting the company feel confident enough in the system to put Mahan behind the wheel."
Re:Is this legal? (Score:2, Informative)
The law currently states that it's illegal to drive when legally blind, which is defined as a visual acuity of 20/200 or less using best correction possible. If your vision is better than 20/200 but still bad, you're assessed on a per-case basis. This suggests that anyone with visual acuity better than 20/200 may be allowed to drive using this technology (or future derivitives of) if it is considered to be a corrective device. How they would measure such improvement is unknown, since visual acuity tests certainly don't involve any driving. This is speculatory, of course, since there will have to be a review of driving law if this kind of thing becomes commonplace.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
He had a policeman sitting next to him ...
"Mahan has no driver's license, of course -- just one of the hurdles that had to be crossed: Google enlisted the aid of Sergeant Troy Hoefling with the Morgan Hill Police Department to accompany the drive."
Man vs. machine (Score:5, Informative)
Did they think of the possibility of driving over a cliff-edge while out of GPS reception?
Or what happens if a bridge collapses? Does the car detect the void underneath it and stop, or just think it's a steep hill and plummet over the edge?
Google cars use only GPS to get direction. The actual driving is done with laser grids and radars (for near distance) and video camera (for long distance). So the car doesn't drive according to what it "thinks" should be there according to the plan, but it drives according to what it "sees" (with its sensors). Any of the situation you mention will end up with the car detecting a lack of drivable surface, stopping, asking its GPS for an alternative route and going another way.
Wherever a human driver will react the same, or will be too busy getting distracted with on-board enterteinment/smartphone/passengers/news paper, etc. and fall into the hole is left as an exercice to the reader. (yup, we've already had stories on /. of clueless drivers wrecking their cars because the GPS told them to go a certain way).
There are a BILLION and one problems, that only happen once in a lifetime.
And that's why you put the stuff on extensive testing. Already in the range of hundreds of miles on actual raods with actual traffic in the case of Google cars.
Yes, it won't take into account some really weird exceptions. But... Humans make mistakes too, and mostly in normal everyday boring situations (because they are boring and the brain kicks into "autopilot" routine mode). (And chance are that some of the really weird situation are going to be "missed" by the human, not because the human wouldn't have had reacted correctly, but because the human was to bored to pay attention). Also even if you, the human driver, think of hundreds of situation which might be missed by an IA, but where you think you'll be able to react correctly, I can probably think of situations where you drove perfectly well, but still got into an accident because of some other driver.
At some point in time, we will reach the situation where an autonomous car (even including the accidents due to weird rare situations) will cause a lot less casualities than a human driver (who might just not be paying attention).
The point of this publicity stunt is to show that, given the current extensive testing the cars have undergone, this point in time is nearing soon.
And, also, the advantage of autonomous cars is, as the wierd situation happens, they can be analysed and the programming can bu updated, leading to even less casualities on the long term. .
Whereas, with human drivers, you can't just magically "programatically remove from the road" asshole, idiot and dristracted drivers
You can't verify a system on this scale. It's like trying to verify a Kinect. You just cannot guarantee what it will detect something as just by a simple test of something similar. And this is orders-of-magnitude more complex, more important and more deadly than a stupid games console.
You can't prove *mathematically* that the autonomous car will be perfect in absolutely every single situation (juste because there is a potential inifity of such situations). But you can prove *statistically* that the autonomous car is better and safer than a human driver based on the number of accidents and casuality caused by both. And overall this *will* mathematically increase the safety on roads.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
They can also drive safely millimetres (like inches but smaller) apart from each other, massively increasing the capacity of the existing road network.
Stopping distance doesn't change that much. The reaction time becomes smaller, but the braking time stays the same. It's fine for normal use, but when the car in front collides with an oncoming vehicle or something falling off bridge and comes to an abrupt stop then your driverless car still needs almost as long as a human-operated car to come to a safe stop without hitting the vehicle in front.
Slowing down (Score:5, Informative)
As explained by other, the car *does* slow down, and even eventually halt when exposed to situation it thinks it can't handle.
Also, the car has much lower reaction times. So in some situations, it doen't really need to slow down, it will react immediatly if needed, whereas a human driver will need to slow down to make room for slower refelexes.
(The distance between autonomous vs human-driven cars on the motorway, for example).
Re:Finally the ATM's will be used! (Score:5, Informative)
Drive-up ATMs have braille for two reasons.
1. It's cheaper and more efficient to make all your ATMs the same, so walk-up and drive-through models are often the same.
2. Blind people need to have access to cash, too, and it's not uncommon for them to be driven to an ATM by a sighted driver. Usually they sit in the rear driver's side seat and the driver just pulls a little more forward than normal so the blind person can access the ATM.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:human factor (Score:5, Informative)
I am currently enrolled in Sebastian Thrun's robot car course CS373. He's the Stanford professor and Google Fellow that headed the group that WON the DARPA Grand Challenge. My understanding, from taking this course, is that their self-driving car is not only able to navavigate to a goal-destination in unfamiliar territory (as in the Grand Challenge, which took place in a desert), but the car is able to identify urban obstacles: crosswalks, stop signs, traffic lights, and can also predict the motion of potential obstacles around it (i.e. cars and pedestrians). The robot car uses controllers with statistical models, so it is able to identify the probability of an obstacle entering the trajectory of the vehicle and respond accordingly -- slowing down like you would in that situation.
Watch some videos of the Stanford car.
Here's the class at Udacity if you're interested.
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs373