Oxford Tests Self-Driving Cars 95
halls-of-valhalla writes "Using advances in 3D laser mapping technology, Oxford University has developed a car that is able to drive itself along familiar routes. This new self-driving automobile uses lasers and small cameras to memorize everyday trips such as the morning commute. This car is not dependant on GPS because this car is able to tell where it is by recognizing its surroundings. The intent is for this car to be capable of taking over the drive when on routes that it has traveled before. While being driven, the car is capable of developing a 3D model of its environment and learning routes. When driving a particular journey a second time, an iPad on the dashboard informs the driver that it is capable of taking over and finishing the drive. The driver can then touch the screen and the car shifts to 'auto drive' mode. The driver can reclaim control of the car at any time by simply tapping the brakes."
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BTW, Good thing Opera replaced its own engine with WebKit too.
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Once one company has done it all others should stop.
Well, not necessarily. There could be lot of interesting (read creative) ideas one could have missed. And indirectly, it creates a healthy compitition everybody benefits from.
If that was not the case, we would have had only one type of car, only one type of plane, only one type of phone..and the list may go on.
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*whoosh*
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As Kruschev told Nixon, it is a waste to have two teams of designers for washing machines.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:5, Interesting)
According to a TV report I saw on this, the point of the Oxford technology is that it's supposed to be much simpler and cheaper than existing implementations, with the development version costing only £5000, and projected price of a commercial version of just £100.
It would be nice if such the article mentioned the existence of comparable tech, such as Google's self-driving cars, and perhaps did some comparisons, but unfortunately being a science and technology journalist these days means copying and pasting press releases, so the journo in question probably actually does have such little interest in technology that he hasn't head of the Google initiative. Sad.
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P.S. according to this article [businessinsider.com], Google's self-driving car is probably considerably more expensive at around $250000 (£160000), although G don't release figures.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's self-driving car is probably considerably more expensive at around $250000
That is the cost of an engineering prototype. The cost of massed produced cars would be far lower. I talked to a Google engineer that was demoing one of their cars at the San Jose Fairgrounds. He pointed out a bulky optical rotary encoder on each wheel, about the size of a soda can, and said they cost over $2000 each. He said they were going to soon replace them with a magnetic hall-effect encoder the size of a penny. Cost: $3 each.
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Of note: I expect that the LIDAR unit in the Oxford car is also dominating the price, and expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:4, Interesting)
the LIDAR unit on the top is probably dominating the price. The model in question costs around $75,000
How many LIDAR units are sold every year? Maybe a few thousand? 60 million cars [worldometers.info] are manufactured each year. That kind of volume can lead to huge price decreases.
expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:5, Insightful)
expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Infra-red cameras cope fairly well, better than the human eye sometimes.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
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Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
Yes, but the goal of self-driving cars is to improve on human drivers, not just replace them.
Re:Google has done this already. (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Just making it non human is already an advantage in some respects. I would gladly replace myself with a self-driving car if it was as good as myself. I might even be willing to pay double for a car with that feature. I mean leather seats, climate control, wood paneling interior, crazy powerful engines, are features I wouldn't pay an extra dime for. Luxury for luxury's sake is stupid, imho. As is speed for speed's sake. But give me a car that drives itself, I 'll buy one right now for twice the price that my existing car is.
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Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
Neither do your eyes, as they really aren't anything more than cameras.
A lot of that is fixed by the information processing equipment attached to them, but that's something you really can't expect to emulate in silicon in near future - the lidar would be cheaper than that.
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Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.
LIDAR doesn't deal well with other LIDAR units in the same area.
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It's going to have to be more than 100 pounds, but you're not going to need the actuators by the time we really have self-driving cars, because the majority will have electric power steering, and modern ABS can already activate without the driver pressing the brake, which is used for TC and ESP.
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Would you like some beef with your horse-burger?
I hope they spell better at Oxford (Score:5, Insightful)
on your car, you have "brakes". if the brakes break, then you have big problems.
Kindly consult the Oxford English Dictionary.
Talking of the Oxford English Dictionary (Score:3)
No, it is not misspelled: initially they put the iPad on the hood
Hood? That's the leaky fabric bit you get on top of convertibles. Perhaps you mean "bonnet"?
Silly Americans naming the metal flap that covers a car engine after a type of headwear... oh, wait... :-)
Meanwhile, if they're going to test these things in Oxford I hope that they're fitting the car with an industrial strength bike-catcher and an AI that can cope with one-way systems designed by M.C. Escher.
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Silly Americans naming the metal flap that covers a car engine after a type of headwear... oh, wait... :-)
says the people who load all their groceries into their footwear to carry it back home.
Re:Talking of the Oxford English Dictionary (Score:4, Funny)
Says the people who load it into the nose of the nearest passing elephant?
Alternatively, the torso or midsection of the car, because that's where the 'trunk' obviously is?
iPad =! Critical embedded system (Score:1)
Re:iPad =! Critical embedded system (Score:4, Insightful)
i doubt it's meant to work with the driver sleeping or anything.
But that is exactly the reason why people want and precisely how they will use self-driving cars - so that they can take their attention off the road. Like the poster above said.. it's good for a prototype, but not for a consumer product.
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I'd be incredibly impressed if they managed to get the driving system is on the iPad.* But I'm sure the iPad just provides the display. There will be another box somewhere that does the driving.
* Impressed by the technical achievement, not the safety.
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For a prototype it's OK
Actually it's a great idea. If the car crashes, you can just blame the driver for holding the ipad wrong.
Actually, the reason they have an ipad in the dashboard is almost certainly because a student thought it would be way cooler to have an ipad with an app relaying data over some connection than plugging a small screen into an embedded PC.
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Knight Rider, (Score:1)
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"breaks" = "brakes" (Score:3, Informative)
But this is a story about Oxford FFS, the cultural heart of the English language, UK version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary [wikipedia.org]
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"breaks" for vehicle brakes keeps coming up here. Is this an Americanism?
Just an illiteratism. Like lose/loose; peek/peak, horde/hoard, etc., all wrong more than right here.
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But "breaks" is a more comical typo than many given that brakes are a safety device that you wish to never break.
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Re:"breaks" = "brakes" (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's just shows the brakes in our education system, after the breaks were put on in the eighties and we started to loose what we had at our peek. No doubt due to the hoards of new students. Whew, well gotta go. I'm beet.
Re:This is great, but not very exciting (Score:4, Insightful)
It's news because it's a different approach.
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It's news because it's a different approach.
Except that it's not. Other self-driving cars, including Google's, already do route learning and mapping. The difference is that Google integrates that with stored maps, and and lots of other sensory input, including GPS. So these Oxford researchers are not doing something new, they are just doing less. In safety critical systems, removing redundancy is usually not a good idea.
One way to make their system more useful would be to upload learned routes to a server, so they can be auto-downloaded to other
Re:This is great, but not very exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
So these Oxford researchers are not doing something new, they are just doing less.
Doing less is a new approach. A sensible one, particularly in robotics. For example see the Roomba, vs the Electolux Trilobyte. The Trilobite mapped the whole room before designing an efficient cleaning route. The Roomba just wanders randomly, with some simple heuristics for occasionally following walls and occasionally changing direction. Result: The cheap Roomba approach is successful in the market, and the expensive Trilobite is a failure.
Here for example you mention GPS. That's of limited use, as the accuracy is in terms of meters. Far too course for self driving. And it can disappear completely in cities. And all it would do is narrow down the initial search space to identify the current location.
One way to make their system more useful would be to upload learned routes to a server, so they can be auto-downloaded to other vehicles. Then your car could self-drive even on roads you haven't driven on before, as long as someone else has driven them.
I suggest you RTFA, then you won't spend time describing something they already have slated for the future.
iPad has a "break" key? (Score:2)
Don't have one to check.
What if I need to accelerate to avoid a hazard? How does "braking", which I assume the poster meant but does not understand, help me regain control?
I've heard that "cruise control" systems allow temporary acceleration, then fall back to the desired speed, while braking puts them into a sort of standby mode which can be resumed. Maybe they should consider something similar.
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You're correct on the cruise control. Here's how it works for every car I've driven that has it:
- Accelerating by pushing the pedal allows you to speed up. Releasing the accelerator allows the car to slow back to it's previously set speed
- Braking will automatically unset cruise control but CC will remain on. You can then hit Resume to have it go back to it's previously set speed
It's a pretty good model that's simple and natural enough for people to learn it in about 2 sentences. If you have to accelerate,
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As a side note, I've found my car also unsets the cruise control when the ESP gets activated (which makes sense) and when acceler
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I'm thinking of this as Cruise Control 2.0
It's a nice transition to autonomous cars. The built in redundancy is a human behind the wheel. The advantage is that the human won't have to assume control every time the car comes up on a slower moving vehicle and it could work on surface streets or in commuter traffic.
The learnings from this will only improve the guidance systems for autonomous driving.
You'd think it would be obivous (Score:3)
You'd think it would be obvious to the folks at Oxford: if you're building 3D maps, and storage is getting relatively cheap, why not just build 3D maps of whole regions so the car knows its way around? Then the human can pick any route, rather than having to teach the computer.
Re:You'd think it would be obivous (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think it would be obvious to some of the folks at slashdot that pontificating about a grand idea is much, much easier than making a simpler idea actually work right.
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We're talking about pre-loading a cache, or pre-computing. This is NOT a grand idea. It's a pretty common thing.
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Time.
Despite what is frequently suggested, there's a much greater scarcity in skilled developers/researchers/whatever than of ideas for them to spend time doing.
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If it's about time then it's also about money and security. If there were money in fun University research projects like this, then I wouldn't be working for an engineering firm. Students don't really make money..
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Because the pictures produced by 3-D maps look much less like the real world than the real world. While the 3D map will probably tell you the height and approximate colour of the building, the real world contains ad-hoc signage, discolouration, texture, minor details such as lamps, signs and street furnityre which will be of great assistance in fine location. I would rather a car that was able to drive down the real road that it had driven down before than one which could drive down a computer model of a ro
An iPad?? (Score:1)
Embedded transmitters (Score:1)
I like how tapping the brakes gives control back, it's like complete cruise control. Wonder what happens when it snows 3 ft (guess what part of the country i live in) or a different situation where the landscape changes. Even after the roads are clear there are still walls of snow that would block any sensors abilities. Maybe we need something up on the phone poles or in the center lane embedded that tells cars where they should go. Seems more reliable that way, but I guess that would be more public in natu
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I like the approach here though, the human has to teach the computer once but then the computer can contribute as & when needed. I can take control quickly if I need to.
What about change? (Score:2)
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One would sincerely hope that it is depending on more than a single point, or single building, fix. It should have at least two or three major reference points in use at any moment, plus more ahead that it is acquiring for future use and more behind that it has passed but have not gone out of sight. I would hope that at any instant it has at least twice as many reference points as it needs.
And if all else fails, just like a human, it should have enough absolute road sense to come smoothly to a halt however
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Re:What about change? (Score:4, Interesting)
the car announces it's confused and you should take over, whilst zipping down the road.
Unless the people developing this are complete morons, there is no way this could happen. The car knows its safe braking distance, and if it cannot map out a route beyond that distance with an acceptable degree of confidence, it would pull over to the side of the road, come to a stop, and then alert the driver.
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Or, keep driving until you can take over
This would require not just an extremely stupid and incompetent programmer, but also a complete lack of any code review, and no system testing whatsoever. It is conceivable that some stupid people are accepted by Oxford, but exceedingly unlikely that they could comprise an entire team of developers. Do you also worry that buildings might collapse because the architect forgot to specify mortar between the bricks, and nobody noticed?
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Plus, as soon as the manual drive is done, the car now has an updated map and can drive the modified route automatically again. If cars can share maps, that one person's manual drive can then be re-used by others and nobody else needs to manually drive it.
can it change lanes? can it route around road bloc (Score:3)
can it change lanes? can it route around road blocks? can it stop for red lights with out getting messed up?
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To 1 and 3: almost certainly. To 2: probably not unless it has already "learned" the alternative route.On the other hand, one difference between computers and humans is that you can copy the "learning" from one computer in a way you cannot copy from one brain to another. So it would not strike me as unreasonable for a net-connected car to download the images of a detour route within a few seconds of recognising a roadblock.
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So it would not strike me as unreasonable for a net-connected car to download the images of a detour route within a few seconds of recognising a roadblock.
Especially if the workers have a small beacon that broadcasts at, say, 5 GHz the map of the area that shows how to drive around the work area. All cars in vicinity receive that and can act upon these instructions if they are signed and the chain of trust is good enough.
That would be better than what we have now - a mass of cars trying to get by the w
This + Street View (Score:2)
Theoretically this mixed with a service that has surveyed the entire road network could be amazing. It would remove the need to have travelled the route previously.
Although I do wonder how it copes with changes in road layout/diversions etc.
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If we could get pass being uncomfortable with letting go of some privacy, this could be amazing as it could supplement street view and update it in "real time". Imagine a road becoming under construction. It is would update in Google Maps and thus reroute other drivers. We could also see this construction on Street View as well. And if we export these cars to N. Korea...
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Note that much of the Street View data already includes a 3D aspect and they have a very basic idea of the location of building surfaces.
TMI Siri (Score:5, Funny)
"I see you are driving down Laurel Ave and I can drive you to your destination. Are you heading to:
- Bosco's Liquor Store (1.73 mi)?
- The Bouncing Pasty Gentleman's Parlor (2.64 mi)?
- The Purple Nurple Tobacco Accessory Shop (1.25 mi)?"
".... Siri, change profile to 'Mom'."
"Okay. Changing user profile settings to 'Mom', please wait"
Re:TMI Siri (Score:4, Funny)
"Are you heading to Kinky Sex Toys?"
and yet.... (Score:5, Funny)
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No, it drives on the right side of the road. Which is to say the left side. Not the right side, as that's the wrong side. Clear?
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Moded overrated? Someone didn't eat their sense-of-humour flakes this morning.
It's "depenDENT" not "dependant"... (Score:1)
Who writes these summaries?
I'm assuming it won't get confused... (Score:1)
These things are wonderful... (Score:2)
...till the first foggy day.
Upon further reflection (Score:2)