Will the Google Car Turn Out To Be the Apple Newton of Automobiles? 287
An anonymous reader writes The better question may be whether it will ever be ready for the road at all? The car has fewer capabilities than most people seem to be aware of. The notion that it will be widely available any time soon is a stretch. From the article: "Noting that the Google car might not be able to handle an unmapped traffic light might sound like a cynical game of 'gotcha.' But MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. 'While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high,' Leonard says. The list of these 'rare' events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49)."
How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Interesting)
didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??
I would've thought some of the better Slashdotters could write software that recognizes a traffic light from a camera feed, let alone the geniuses at Google.
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd imagine it's pretty damn hard. Harder still is figuring out whether that stop light applies to the lane you're in, and the direction you're turning. Stop lights don't always line up with lanes exactly, they don't always point straight, etc etc.
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Considering the benefits, bring on the laws that mandate that each stop light wifi/bluetooth/whatever broadcasts its state .
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Insightful)
> What we need is better geo-mapping from cities themselves
For driver less cars to work, the whole city should be wired so the google car doesn't have to recognize the red light, it would just get the information through some type of wireless transmission thus knowing it has to stop. It may fall back on A.I. on country roads with not much traffic but then again.
A.I. is not advanced as we sometimes think it is. Even good drivers can have trouble recognizing a red light in bright sunlight conditions.
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the cars that fall back to AI then communicate their observations and decisions back to Google then to other cars then the next car wouldn't need AI and could improve knowledge of the area, plus any particularly bad problem spots can be highlighted for further investigation at Google HQ.
Normal drivers don't have LIDAR. I assume it is a massive assistance for some aspects of Google's work.
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the real goal would be to have all vehicles self-drive; then they can be coordinated to interlace at intersections, removing the need for stop lights and saving a ton of fuel!
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And then we will need to build pedestrian overpass / tunnels.
May as well build tunnels so the people put out of work by this have a place to sleep that is more open then the jail.
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Pre-mapped environments are a dead end (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way a car can be designed to safely self-drive is doing it just the way we do: by creating a local, up-to-date mapping of the surrounding area in real time and working within that representation with sufficient skill to respond to anything that might appear.
Pre-existing environmental mapping simply cannot keep up. Construction, pets crossing the road, wild animals, falling rocks, pedestrians, vandalism of road signs and traffic indicators and lane painting, washouts, drunks, heart attacks, stinging insects, oversize loads swinging around traffic lights and signs, special transports, some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"... the list of unpredictable effects upon the local driving environment seems almost endless -- and keep in mind these things can occur in combinations of more than one type and more than one incident. Often suddenly.
Further, if the car is smart enough to be capable of updating the environmental map in real time and deal with any combination of changes, then it's already smart enough to maintain a completely dynamic local mapping and doesn't need a pre-existing mapping for anything but gross navigational purposes (route planning) and even that can require the vehicle to adapt.
Contrariwise, if it isn't smart enough to maintain a full local environmental mapping, then it is inherently unsafe.
Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.
Re:Pre-mapped environments are a dead end (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.
I think quite a few people at Google have thought about that, came to the same conclusion as you and started working on the problem.
The thing that people dont get is that it will take years, if not decades to get fully autonomous cars onto the road. They aren't due out in 2018 and yes we know what models are coming in 2018, an updated 370z, a new NSX and a few others no-one has any interest in.
The first autonomous cars wont be by Google, in fact I doubt there will be a Google car, the first autonomous cars will be Merc's or Toyotas built using Googles technologies and the autonomous part will only work on specially outfitted roads (and they will be controlled, limited access roads at first) so you'll still be required to drive a car. In fact you probably wont see a car without a steering wheel or other controls in your lifetime.
You're quite right that roads will need to be upgraded to provide telemetry to autonomous cars, and this will happen gradually over many, many decades.
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Didn't say that, didn't mean to imply it, and don't believe it. Other than that, no. :)
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some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"...
The irony is that is the sort of example that people give, but happens so rarely as to be almost not worth bringing up.
The fact is, self-driving cars don't have to be perfect. They only have to be better than humans. Since we kill 40,000 people on the roads every year, give or take, and injure many thousands (if not millions) more...
The truth is, they are already probably "good enough".
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Building a car that gets a new traffic light right 99% of the time is probably trivial
Maybe. But considering that I go through about 15 traffic lights on my way to work (and then the same 15 again on my way home), a car that handled them correctly 99% of the time would have about a 1 in 3 of messing at least one of them up EACH DAY.
We're looking for five nines here, minimum.
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There are some lights where you have a red ball and green arrow (not just for left turns) some areas have diagonal arrow the point the way for the main flow of the road and I have seen people confused by that.
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Informative)
didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??
Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist. He found out that Google maps out roads, keeping a database of signs, lane markings, etc. He then concluded that the Google car only works on pre-mapped roads. That is not true. If the car is driving on a pre-mapped road, it will use the info from the database. But it can still drive on other roads with good accuracy. There are still come problems to be worked out, and plenty of testing to be done, before SDCs are ready for sale to the public. But TFA is a very inaccurate description of those problems.
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I'm interested in whether the car can set an appropriate speed when it comes upon a sign saying "Speed Limit 35 When Children Are Present" or "...When School In Session", and whether the car can read and obey hand signals, and whether the car knows right turns are prohibited at a particular intersection during rush hour.
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I'm interested in whether the car can set an appropriate speed when it comes upon a sign saying "Speed Limit 35 When Children Are Present" or "...When School In Session"
It can use OCR to read signs. It also can make a decision about whether school is in session. Since it cannot reliably detect when children are present, it would most likely just default to the lower speed.
whether the car can read and obey hand signals
Hand signals are a problem. Google is working on it. But SDCs aren't going to just pop up on the road one day. Their release will be coordinated with the police. So one solution is for the police to use LED flashlight wands that the SDCs are programmed to recognize.
whether the car knows right turns are prohibited at a particular intersection during rush hour.
Sure. An SDC would know the same
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That should be easier then identifying a stoplight, because the signs are very standard, are in easily predictable places, and don't look like anything else. You simply program the car to recognize that a sign with this format means this speed limit under these circumstances.
Stoplights can be multiple colors (most are yellow, but some are black), look like quite a few things you drive by every day (ie: a police car with lights on, or a street sign warning there's a light ahead), may be strung across the roa
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I walk my children to school past a "When Children Are Present" sing. I've never seen a single driver obey the lower speed limit. So if that's appropriate action, then yes, I'll bet it can do that. I'd take just obeying the posted normal limit.
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Really, the problem is that "when children are present" is kind of ambiguous. What if there's only one child? And is the concern really all children, or just unaccompanied children? Are high school students children? Do kids in strollers count? And so on.
Most drivers would assume that the intended purpose is to increase safety around the time when kids are arriving at school or leaving school en masse. So they would interpret it to mean "Speed Limit [X] on Monday through Friday, from 7:15–8:00 a
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Sorry but this article [wired.com] has different information.
The key advantage is that the car isn’t just seeing and figuring out the world as it drives along. It’s basing its actions on vast amounts of data the Google Self-Driving Car Project has already compiled about every road it travels. Before the car drives itself into new territory, the project team collects detailed information on permanent features: lane markers, the precise location of the curbs, the height of traffic lights, local speed limits, and so forth.
“We require digital maps in order for our cars to be able to drive,” Andrew Chatham, who leads mapping on the project, said at a press event Tuesday. That data “makes the job of building the self-driving car software much simpler.”
The car has a good idea of what to expect from any stretch of road, freeing up the software to deal with cars, pedestrians, cyclists, construction, and any other new obstacles in real time.
That’s the “magic of maps,” Software Lead Dmitri Dolgov said. But that “magic” inherently limits the range of the self-driving car to areas Google has the data for. As Chatham pointed out, “If we have not already built our own maps in an area, the car cannot drive there.” He noted that as the car’s sensors get better, they will rely less on perfect accuracy, but Chris Urmson, the project director, emphasized the key role these maps play.
Regular Google maps do not have enough accuracy.
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Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist.
If you're going to quibble about credentials, you ought to at least read the summary, where the MIT roboticist says he doesn't expect to see fully self-driving cars in his lifetime. Do you think he is confused too?
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the MIT roboticist says he doesn't expect to see fully self-driving cars in his lifetime. Do you think he is confused too?
If he actually believes that, then yes, I think he is confused. He is 49. If even 10% of life extension research pans out, he should easily live to 90. That is 41 years. Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable. Even if we don't yet have general AI by then, huge progress will be made in algorithms for computer vision, pervasive sensors, etc. Even ten years ago, the car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge was able to navigate dirt roads through the desert. We can do far bette
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Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable.
Are you guessing this based on Moore's law?
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The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage.
It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and
its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crum
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So can people. One possible solution would be radio signals in every traffic light to indicate the light's state. No signal and can't see the light? Stop the car and tell the driver to take over. This would be useful for eliminating confusion when you have multiple lights as well, so it might be worth pursuing.
That said, the simpler fix is to use a higher quality camera with better lens coatings. I
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No, I haven't solved any of the hard problems, because determining whether a colored ball or arrow is meaningful really isn't one of them. The hard problems are things like:
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But it can still drive on other roads with good accuracy.
The lights are out at a junction. How does "good accuracy" help the car figure out when it's safe to proceed, or the order to proceed when there are buses, cars, trucks coming from all direction with an implied priority based on conditions and time people have waited?
Now a cop turns up to direct the traffic because of a fender bender. How does the car with "good accuracy" know to obey the cop's hand signals?
Now the repair crew turn up to fix the lights and put cones out so people turning have to do so f
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that "good accuracy" is not yet to the point where the driverless car is less likely to run over a pedestrian at an intersection than a car piloted by a human.
I very much disagree with this assessment. Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human, which is the important criteria. If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.
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If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.
The problem you have is, someone like that wont let the car drive itself because a self driving car will stick to speed limits and slow down at pedestrian crossings because it will be programmed to anticipate stopping at a pedestrian crossing (like a defensive driver is trained to do). Nope, someone that self adsorbed and with such poor time management skills will be taking manual control with the pedal pressed to the floor whilst screaming into their phone. You simply cant overcome selfishness with a new t
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on local highways / limited access roads next to no one does the speed limits and the cops let you get a way with it as well. Even on the local roads you can do at least 5 MPH over
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The problem you have is, someone like that wont let the car drive itself because a self driving car will stick to speed limits and slow down at pedestrian crossings because it will be programmed to anticipate stopping at a pedestrian crossing (like a defensive driver is trained to do). Nope, someone that self adsorbed and with such poor time management skills will be taking manual control with the pedal pressed to the floor whilst screaming into their phone. You simply cant overcome selfishness with a new technology.
If an accident happens, and you have a car that could have driven itself, and recorded what speed it should have gone and what speed it did go (like "crossing ahead, slow down from 50mph to 30mph" vs real speed accelerating to 60), you have an excellent witness. Jailtime for killing a pedestrian can overcome selfishness.
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If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.
If you think that's supposed to instill confidence, you might want to re-think that. Your're compairing a computer to a severely distrtacted human. A human, I might add that's breaking the law. Distracted driving is illegal.
You need to compare the SDC to a fully
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I don't think it's going to take anywhere near as long as people think. There's a *huge* market for this. My grandmother in law is 93. She basically can't drive, but wants to stay in her house. My wife's in the hospital righ
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WHAT? What ever happened to "Plan for the worst and hope for the best"? That's how all the engineers around here operate. You said everyone thinks they're above average but are apparently lying to themselves so if the majority is indeed a shitty driver, why would you pretend they're anything else? And also why does someone who is a shitty driver but believes and acts as if he's a F1 driver be a worse problem than a socc
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Do you have any idea how stupid that point is? I suppose the people being held by ISIS shouldn't worry because most people wouldn't behead them, only someone breaking the law and that's illegal! I can stop locking my house as well because entering and taking my stuff is a crime! That must mean I shouldn't be concerned about it because it's illegal.
It's pretty fucking obvious that illegal, distracted or poor driving causes the vas
Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human,
I'd really be interested if you have a reference for this. Even if your reference is just a Google PR person, that's still better than nothing.
Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...
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Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...
The SDC would notice the conflict between the RFID and the sensor data, and pull over and stop, while alerting the human driver/passenger.
Someone with sufficient education and expertise to clone an RFID would probably have better things to do than pull a stupid juvenile prank that could send them to prison for a long time. There are numerous ways that people can sabotage infrastructure and kill people. We can't prevent that, but it is rarely a problem, because most people are not motivated to murder rando
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Yes, your argument certainly convinced me that no one would ever vandalize street signs
The question isn't whether someone would "ever" do it, but whether people would do it often enough for it to matter. Snipers occasionally shoot into traffic. But we don't consider that when we design roads and cars. Nonetheless, the algorithm to handle a sabotaged location sensor (RFID, Magenetic, or whatever) is brain dead obvious: pull over and stop the car. Stolen stop signs cause a few deaths every year. Those deaths would be eliminated with SDCs, because they could access their database and know
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would people do it often enough. Yes. Yes they would. Around my place it happens about once a week that somebody reprograms a construction sign. And you seem to not understand how teenagers work. When they steal a stop sign, are they thinking they're hoping to kill somebody? No, no they are not. They think it's funny. They don't stop and think what the consequences of their actions are. You're problem is, you're applying logic to a fundamentally illogical situation. People and logic are separate e
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Yeah, you don't want the military vehicle running over people, then the soldiers wouldn't have the fun of shooting them.
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Doing it is easy. Doing it with a very very high degree of confidence? Hard.
You just have to miss that one stop light for something bad to happen.
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Describe for me, programmatically, the difference between a stoplight and a taillight.
and a police light
and a neon sign
and every other red light on earth...
and also, please include all the many shapes and sizes of the various stoplights all over the country.
Stop signs have a very specific shape, and text printed on them. They do not very from place to place. They're piratically a damned bar code as far software is concerned. It's almost like they were designed for the task.
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That's easy. The stoplight is above you. Two cameras at different angle provide sufficient parallax to tell the difference between something far away on a hill and something nearby above the car. And you're done.
Same answer.
Same answer, plus the stoplight is not on the side of the road, as computed based on distance to the edge of the road when looking forward.
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It's almost like they were designed for the task.
They were indeed designed for the task. The idea of that octogonal shape in almost every part of the world is for people to be able to recognize that sign without any confusion. It also allows drivers facing the back of the sign to identify that drivers from other lanes have a stop sign. It is also identifiable by night (because original signs were not reflective and cars lights were not particularly effective).
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IMHO, cars won't be (safely) automated until roads are. Yeah, I know, catch-22.
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Air travel is very simple in terms of dealing with traffic. The sky is big, so you simply point the direction you want to go and you go.
But there's a whole host of things an aerial autopilot needs to be able to do that GoogleDrive doesn't.
For example, for a plane to fly it has to have an Airspeed above it's stall-speed. Airspeed refers to the speed of the air going over the wings. If your aircraft is x lbs, you need x lbs of air under your wings at all times or you lose lift and instead of going up you're g
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Rain and snow? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow, both of things people in the Bay Area rarely experience.
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That's not true. I've lived in the Bay Area, there's a lot of rain and fog. SoCal is completely different: no rain, occasional fog.
Re:Rain and snow? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow
LIDAR does not "fail" in rain/snow/fog. It just doesn't work as well. So what? Neither do human eyeballs. Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.
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Re:Rain and snow? (Score:4, Funny)
Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.
Considering that Texans and Okies tend to speed up when the streets are slippery and visibility's been reduced, I suspect this confirms my suspicion: hicks aren't human! :p
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LIDAR still works to detect surfaces, but when the road is covered in snow, the surface it's seeing isn't the road.
How can the car know where the lanes are if it can't even tell where the road starts and ends? GPS isn't accurate enough for the car to guess which lane it's in without visual cues, and if there are no visual cues, then the car effectively can't operate.
And, as it happens, Google does say that their cars don't work on snow-covered roads. That's a bit of a problem where I live, where you can hav
I could see it used in specific cases.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they built special lanes or only worked on places like the Freeway. It would be nice to have a self driving car for a 6 hour road trip and then manually take over in the cities or where the car had issues.
Re:I could see it used in specific cases.... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The car can drive for 2.5 hours on the freeway by itself, while you are not paying attention.
2) When the car arrives to an offramp, it will notify you (in advanced) that it's your turn to start driving.
3) If there is a problem along the way, the car will pull over and stop (or similar) before handing you control.
That way, you don't have to focus intently while the car is in control.
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A driver less car is pretty much worthless to me if I ever have to take over. Either I am focused on the task at hand (driving) or I am not. To do otherwise only maximizes distraction and invites accidents and injury. Imagine sinking into the daily Facebook updates after 2.5 hours of mind-numbing automated driving when suddenly a chime goes off indicating that the automated systems have failed and you have 1.5 seconds to make a decision critical to the safety of the vehicle and its occupants.
I agree it's worthless at 1.5 seconds but not if the warning time was 15 minutes and if you didn't respond then it just pulled over to the side of the road.
This would be a huge benefit for travellers, business people, and truck drivers. Imagine getting in a car at 8pm in chicago, falling asleep and being woke
up at 8am saying you are about to arrive in New York. If I was google, I would take what I learned from city driving, learn from it, and switch full gear
in supporting major interstates. I would do it
Was it ever intended to be a commercial product? (Score:2)
It isn't clear to me that Google ever intended this to be a commercial product, or at least not in the short-to-medium term. Treated as a research project, it is impressive regardless of the practical limitations.
Limited Vision (Score:3, Interesting)
"said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (heâ(TM)s 49)."
He is a man of limited vision. I did a lot of AI research and development, long ago, back in the dark ages of computing, and I disagree. I'm only a few years older and I do expect to see fully self-driving cars in my lifetime. Perhaps I merely will live longer...
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I don't agree with you. Scientific expansion in ML is of exponential growth: what took 20 years to achieve will take only 10 to be doubly improved. When I see the state of the art in computer vision 2014, I have almost no doubt the vision problems associated with automatic cars will be solve in a fewer amount of time that anyone expected.
At least ... (Score:2)
At least the Newton was a bit revolutionary. It could have been worse. At least it isn't the iPod HiFi of Automobiles.
Re:At least ... (Score:4, Funny)
Beat up Martin.
Eat up Martha.
http://i.imgur.com/06fu9sE.jpg [imgur.com]
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Unless my history is rusty, Newton begat the ARM chip that we all know so well.
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Cars will be the secondary market (Score:5, Interesting)
The first vehicle with this technology is not going to be a personal car, or anything that resembles a personal car (like a taxi). It's going to be semi trucks with trailers.
From a conference I sat in on last week (dealing with railroads, not trucks themselves), the turnover rate for truck drivers is over 100% per year. This is considered a plus for the railroads. I say that this is a plus for autonomous trucks. They drive autonomously site to site, and then, a driver takes over to get them parked into the loading dock (most likely), the trucks manage to do this autonomously (maybe, but not the scenario I see winning out, not at the beginning), or the docks are redesigned to make it easy for the autonomous trucks to park them in loading position (what will happen once autonomous trucks are widely used).
Yes, I realize other changes will have to be made. Refueling will have to be done manually in the beginning. That may mean the truck stop hires a person or two, that then takes care of the autonomous trucks, and I'm sure the owners will gladly pay a bit of a premium to get their trucks fueled. At least until the automated fuel pumps for the trucks are in place, at existing or new truck stops.
I have zero doubt that my great grandchildren won't have to learn how to drive a vehicle. I have grandchildren, and yes, I expect that they will have to learn how to drive, the technology is moving that fast.
Yet.
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over 100% turnover per year?
think they are selling you something...
for instance there is a driver in my family, been driving for a few decades and at least 1 decade for the same company
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Sounds like a dream scenario for robbers. The truck will drive defensively and will stop when blocked by another car. It won't evade. So now we need a terminator on each truck.
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Sounds like a nightmare scenario for robbers: any decent software will send all data to the owner (and police) in such an event. Data like images of the robbers, location, images of the cars (with license plates) and which way they went.
Most truck thefts in the Netherlands are done on truck stops. When the driver sleeps. Guess what? An SDC doesn't do that.
The best idea (Score:2)
Is it start with a limited environment. Have these operate in large resorts, amusement parks, wildlife reserves etc. Build a big base of realworld usage before venturing further afield.
Humans have rules for driving (Score:3)
Humans have rules for driving. For example:
-> If you see a traffic light, identify what color it is, then continue, slow down, or stop based on one of those 3 colors.
So the Google Car cannot identify a traffic light? Or if it does, it cannot identify its color? If so, is that a weakness in the computing power? Like, a supercomputer could do these things, but a reasonably sized onboard computer cannot? Or a weakness in "vision" sensors?
-> Paper versus rock in the road: This, I can understand. There are a myriad things in the road. The decision here is, can the car safely pass over it? Inability to determine this is due to vision sensors or limitations in computing power?
I saw an interesting problem the other day: a piece of wood baseboard trim (for a wall) blew off a truck. It seemingly hung suspended in air then came down. I hit my brakes but kept going straight, hoping for the best. It hit the ground, bounced and lay flat. I imagine that might legitimately freak out an autonomous car.
A moron can drive safely, through city traffic, if he's highly motivated, manages to keep his attention on the road and his speed down. I guess a moron is still more capable of navigating the world than a computer.
Another stupid viewpoint from slate that is (Score:4, Insightful)
almost genius in its idiocy. If self-driving cars really start to hit the roads, cities would definitely mandate that all traffic lights show up in maps, and require that traffic lights show up in maps before being installed. This is not a problem of the driving car, it's a problem of trying to imagine future technology in a current context, which is of course always going to lead you astray.
Plus, as other commenters have said, self-driving cars can definitely recognize traffic lights. It's just that right now they aren't quite as good at doing that as humans are. The reason is that traffic lights and construction cones and stuff like that are optimized for human visibility, not robot visibility. It's quite trivial to adapt them for robot visibility as well (perhaps even incorporating stuff like specialized radio signals).
I predict that horseless carriages will never take off because without an animal like a horse with hooves on the ground, you could hit rocks and fall into ditches without knowing it.
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I predict that horseless carriages will never take off because without an animal like a horse with hooves on the ground, you could hit rocks and fall into ditches without knowing it.
A horseless carriage still has a human driver with much more intelligence than a computer. Computers do not yet have the AI to recognize most objects and figure out what to do about them.
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It's quite trivial to adapt them for robot visibility as well (perhaps even incorporating stuff like specialized radio signals).
Or blink a bright IR diode... In the short term the cars will need to learn how humans do it. In the longer term the cars may have their own information channel to augment how we currently do it.
Some issues not mentioned in the summary (Score:3)
The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage.
It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and
its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
Because it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper, it will try to drive around both if it encounters either sitting in the middle of the road.
Use a little imagination and you can surely think of other issues.
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For added amusement: a rock inside a crumpled-up piece of newspaper. They might actually fair better than a human on that test.
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Right now objects are just blobs of pixels. The way the current car tells the difference between a postbox and a person is that the route has been pre scanned and gone over by a person to identify all post boxes. What happens when a post box is installed after the scan is done? The Google car will assume it is a person.
The second issue is that Google car is very good at not running into a person that is moving but not so good a yielding to a person waiting to cross. Say you have a person standing on a corne
Silly expectations (Score:2)
The expectation of this article is that Google will somehow shortly produce a car which will completely replace drivers in all circumstances. Clearly, that's the eventual goal, but that's not needed to produce something useful. Car companies are already churning out various incomplete solutions that help with highway driving or parking.
I expect their initial product to be something that works as a taxi in semi-controlled circumstances, or something that makes driving more convenient, but which requires inte
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Early cell phones were overpriced bricks.
That is a very bad comparison. The reason cell phones replaced land lines is that cell phones became smaller and had longer battery life. Cell phones do not need artificial intelligence to recognize the objects on or near a road. For example, someone standing on a corner with a crosswalk going in both directions. Are they waiting for someone? Are they waiting for you to yield? Are they waiting for other cars to yield in other direction? A human can figure that out by watching what the person is doing. Compu
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I fully expect driverless cars to replace long haul drivers first. Then short haul, then taxis, then everyone else. Each one of those steps will come with a long list of restrictions. But as you move to the next step those restrictions get less and less.
So you expect the heaviest things, those which take the most space on the road, those which can do the most damage if any error occurs to be replaced first?
Next Year ! Really ! (Score:2)
The power of exponentials!?!?!? (Score:2)
I wonder what the iCar would be then? (Score:2)
Comparing the Apple Newton and the iPhone... I'd say that the iCar would be a car that's well connected and essentially controlled by Apple. It would not work on roads not approved by Apple. It would probably be controlled by a touch screen or voice. However it would not drive by itself, as that feature has been proven to be complicated. Of course it won't have a driving wheel, instead it'll have a software driving wheel on a large touch screen in front of you.
Functionality wise, the iPhone was a _huge_ ste
Driving is filled with intractible problems (Score:2)
Self drive cars might work on a closed track where the number of external factors are limited and can be controlled. e.g. an airport loop, or a theme park transfer. It might even work on some stretches of public road e.g. some motorways although it is more likely to be an advanced driver assist mode.
It sure as hell wouldn't work in urban settings, or for atypical conditions. It's trivial to think of scenari
Like the first product in a class in the hands of (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds good! Newton was commercially available, has a loyal fan base and inspired successive generations of more polished and popular products, including Palm and Apple's own iPhone. True, there is no guarantee that just because you release an early adopter product, you will reap most of the benefits when technology matures. But not being on a lookout for new things guarantees slide into irrelevance, like Kodak or Borders. Besides someone got to do it.
Re:Government doesn't have records (Score:4, Interesting)
It really depends on how much "safer" autonomous cars are doesn't it. The current problem with software is that when it fails it fails usually catastrophically, what do you do when you fail, stop that could be dangerous, keep going dangerous too. People don't usually fail as completely as software they make lots of small mistakes but usually do a good enough job.
the road toll is 14.9 per 100,000 per year that is quite low considering how much people drive, you would need a lot of testing, in real life scenarios to convince me that automated car was safer. And each release would need that level of testing. Yes you may get one driver who is bad kill a few people but a bad software release could kill much more.
I am not saying automated cars aren't safer, just that just because they are automated doesn't automatically make them so.
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Given that safety is one of the governments biggest reasons for existing
Wow. I'm not sure that's actually true........
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Sure it is. Government exists (partly) to help secure our right to life, by protecting from threats both internal and external.
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Power is the reason why govts exist. Their. Continuing mission is to consolidate more power.
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While there is serious obstacle to overcome for a fully autonomous car, the point the author make is weak.
The author made more than one point.
A car working in a limited area, with good condition, let's say you start with a city. And sensor mapping everything all the time (including when human drive) would bring massive input of information. With increase capability of detection. Incrementally increasing the covered area.
Google themselves say the problem of mapping the US in enough detail is too big. They're hoping to find a better way to do it (though of course with uninvented technology everything is possible).
Automation of detection of light/traffic sign is a problem on which a lot of people are working, not only google, expect this problem to be "solved" before long.
People have been working on this problem, probably for longer than you've been alive.
All the car are connected. This would make it that much harder to miss one given all the "eyes" watching for them.
That's another very interesting technology that still exists in the realm of theory. It's nice but it's not the Google car.
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My motto is "Find a fucking dictionary"
You're welcome [amazon.com]
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Just in time for fusion powerplants.