Google Using Self-Driving Car Data To Make Cars Smarter

cartechboy (2660665) writes "One thing Google has perfected is using massive data sets generated from users to improve user experience. Google's self-driving cars may be subject to the same cycle of improvement, as they have racked up considerable mileage on public roads, and each mile generates data that Google engineers can use to 'teach' vehicle. Meet Pricilla — a Google test driver on the self-driving car project as she does a video walk through of some of the improvements created so far. Some are fairly simplistic, for example: 'The car does move to avoid large obstacles." That said, the car can also detect a bicyclist signaling and stay clear — oddly, even when that cyclist changes his mind and zig zags a little." Google is now testing cars on the city streets of Mountain View.

Re:Still waiting to see 3 things

[Missing.Matter]

A snow storm is the big one. Also, rain and dust can be a big problem as well. The thing is, when you R&D these systems in sunny California, silly things like "precipitation" seem to get forgotten. I remember seeing a presentation about the Google street view cars, and how when they deployed them to other regions, they had to institute lens cleaning procedures because they had pretty much forgotten it rains in other places in the world.

Not sure we need it

[nine-times]

These kinds of problems do need to be addressed, but I'm not sure they need to be *fixed* before you turn this into a product. For the snow-storm example, I don't think the car needs to be able to drive in the snow. It's much more important that the car is capable of detecting "this is a situation in which I can't operate safely," and refusing to try. It should be good enough if the car's AI can say, in effect, "Listen, human, I can't take responsibility for driving in this snow storm. If you're comfortable driving in it, go ahead and take manual control. Otherwise, we're staying right here." On the other hand, I could see an interesting application in providing some kind of intelligent 'driver assist' for bad weather conditions that helped the driver maintain traction.

Regarding details, I think the ideal would be for most road conditions, detours, and traffic issues to be kept up-to-date on a database that could allow for dynamic routing instead of the car relying completely on markers. It's not a complete solution, but again, it may be enough to pair a large database with some ability for the car to say, "I don't know what to do here, so I'm going to either give back manual control or pull over and wait."