Jaguar Land Rover Makes System For Mapping Potholes For Autonomous Vehicles 77
An anonymous reader writes: Jaguar Land Rover is developing a system that identifies potholes and other obstructions in the road and shares them via the cloud with highway authorities, and, potentially, other drivers with access to the report network. The project's research director Dr. Mike Bell says that such a network could help autonomous vehicles avoid potholes without crossing lanes or endangering other drivers. The team is also working on a stereo-camera system capable of identifying possible obstructions in the road. Dr. Bell says "there is a huge opportunity to turn the information from these vehicle sensors into 'big data' and share it for the benefit of other road users. This could help prevent billions of pounds of vehicle damage and make road repairs more effective."
Stereo cameras (Score:1)
Yes, at least. The vehicle should have many cameras. It would be easier to avoid any object that isn't flat.
Re:Stereo cameras (Score:4, Funny)
"This could help prevent billions of pounds of vehicle damage."
Mike Tyson does damage in pounds. Potholes cause economic damage. Silly Brits; measuring car damage as a weight. I'm surprised they didn't say "millions of stones of damage!" ;-)
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Whoever modded my previous "flamebait" doesn't understand satire. Even with the emoticon hint, ;-) really, you missed that? Sure, don't mod it funny if you don't agree; heck, even mod it overrated if you mus!. But "flamebait"?! LOL
You sir, are awarded the good humor prize: http://www.creativecertificate... [creativecertificates.com]
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No, no. You mean stones. That is what they measure human weight in over there. *nods*
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Mod parent +1 informative. I thought the Americans were just stupid. After all, they don't use kg to weigh freight, so my expectations were pretty low.
Ummm, you do know that the British are responsible for the horrible imperial system of measures that still persists in the USA, right?
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At the time every country had a similar shitty system, including the French.
That comes with having to invent weights and measures from scratch without the benefit of hindsight. And having kings with big thumbs and feet.
Re:Why only limit it with stereo cameras (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, what causes the billions in economic damage is not pounding by Mike Tyson, but speed bumps This will hopefully provide clear and irrefutable evidence that some speed bumps cause severe to cars even as speeds well below the prevailing limit. Hopefully leading to class actions against the local governments.
Road repairs? (Score:1)
Some of the potholes I know of have tenure.
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That's why they need to be mapped so that they can be given historical designation.
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Because that was happening so often before?
Libertarian Paradise, Here We Come! (Score:2)
Now we just need automated road builders, then we can just get rid of government altogether (FINALLY! Someone/thing to build the roads!).
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We'll have the automated road-laying behemoth knocking down people's houses and paving over their remains just in time for the Vogon automated hyperspace bypass extrusion ship to swing by our arm of the galaxy.
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Sounds more like a socialist paradise you are describing.
A Libertarian one would be a bunch of toll roads where the operators can make bids based one money, speed, and number of potholes for the automated system to heuristically choose between to optimize your travel experience.
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That's because you have thoroughly fallen under the spell of socialist propaganda. In a free market, prices fall, and quality of service rises. That's just the way it is, no matter how much you hate the fact that two people want to trade without consulting you to ensure that the trade is "fair". No, fact is that when humans are removed from the equation, market forces VERY QUICKLY work to push the cost of a given thing to ZERO. This is what h
Re:Libertarian Paradise, Here We Come! (Score:4, Insightful)
In a free market, the larger players buy out the smaller players, create enforced monopolies, prices rise and service falls and eventually people start dying. Government steps in and is force to write a whole slew of regulation to prevent to try to prevent recurrence and of course break up the monopolies, to big to fail means to big to allow to exist.
Free market internet and the backbone players will no longer cooperate and start demanding a publishing fee for all content, they will also censor at will. Any new players they will actively bankrupt by temporarily dropping prices at the critical capital investment phase whilst revenue is still to be generated.
They never ever charge a fair price based upon actual costs. They charge the highest possible price for the lowest possible service that is at the limit of what their majority market can afford and the minority beyond that, well, screw them is the response.
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No.
What actually happens, taking that most evil of all corporations that has ever existed in the history of evil, Standard Oil, prices fall tenfold, quality dramatically improves, competitors who can't cut muster are bought out, leaving SO with 90% of market share (remembering that the other 10% is now populated with competitors strong enough, with a good enough product at a low enough price to continue existing), NOT 100%, and amazing innovations, like the concept of corp
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I bet they can't pass the mustard either.
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Referring to those in charge who can't get rid of the dead weight in their company.
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From your link (which I'd seen before):
"This etymology seems plausible at first"
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What?
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Sorry, there is no satisfying you. Please never get into a position where your words have arbitrary power over others, because you will hurt and kill them in your hurry to help, because you don't understand economics or the motivations behind human action.
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The REAL future is here and it's absolutely amazing. What amazes me only slightly less is how everyone seems so blaze about it. I constantly feel like shouting from the rooftops every time something new and amazing happens.
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I had that sort of experience last week when I *really* had to rely on my phone's navigation features for the first time when driving through a completely new city in a rented car from point to point, both completely unknown to me. It worked 100% flawlessly, and gave me a bit of a "holy crap, that's really amazing technology" sort of jolt. I remember how incredibly difficult it was using traditional paper maps, and trying to fumble with them while driving, and God help you if you miss a turn and get lost.
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Might be useful in the northeastern US (Score:4, Informative)
The northeastern United States has some of the worst potholes in the country, which are largely the result of heavy road wear from traffic combined with cold winters that either create or expand cracks in the pavement. The problem is that it gets so cold here in the winter that road crews are unable to apply asphalt to the road and have to use this "cold pack" stuff that serves as a temporary fix until it gets warm enough to spread asphalt. The "cold pack" is prone to erosion and often wears out multiple times during the winter.
I could see the road departments here using these sensors to figure out where the cold pack is eroding and fix it before it degrades completely.
New York City (Score:2)
I also live in San Diego: I'm pretty sure it's a parasite which feeds on Federal Highway Dollars. It normally only afflicts populations in the less fortunate/"weather-challenged" fly-over states. Our state's GDP is subsidizing their unfortunate choice of residence so that the farmers have someone to talk to.
You are poorly-informed.
Potholes on roads in and out of NYC in a bad winter can get *incredibly* bad. That's 800,000+ vehicles a day, many of them *very* high-end, with tires bouncing off jagged holes repeatedly at significant speeds.
This despite the fact that NYC has probably the most extensive use of mass transit in the nation.
Sensors can avoid the holes (Score:2)
What good are sensors that report this?
We have a pair of potholes here on an on-ramp that takes about 2 months to become holes every time they fix them. They look like twi round buttons, with mous^h car-over effect. When freshly fixed they stick out a bit. Then the buttons slowly move into pressed state ;)
Theres a lot of crumbled asphalt accumulating in the steel structure below those holes that the asphalt street is built on. They take about a month or two to fix it up and then it starts "pressing the buttons" again.
You can calibrate the calendar on this, yet I have to avoid these for a month or so every couple months by using the other lane although that lane will exit and I have to go back over again.
Your lane is wider than your car. If you know the precise location of a pothole you can frequently drive around it in the right driving conditions, either by switching lanes or by moving within your lane.
A computer that knows the precise location is substantially more likely to be able to do that than a human driver, resulting in a lot less wear on your vehicle and slower expansion of the pothole.
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I can see road departments using the fact that the cars can drive around potholes to ignore them for even longer than they do now. Roads will become undriveable for humans ;)
Identify and aim for the pothole (Score:3, Funny)
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The banned rhino bars in many places because if/when the vehicle hits a pedestrian they make the injuries a lot more severe.
What about in New York City? (Score:2)
I thought major cities had pothole databases just bursting at the seams with data entries, it's just that it was set to write-only.
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Yeah, my first thought was that this was technology solving the wrong problem. Local governments cut road repair costs before cutting things like salaries, and understandably so. So in most cases I think our bad potholes are not a matter of a poor reporting method, but rather of neglect and underfunding. Without a steady and sustained funding source our roads and infrastructure vary in quality quite a bit more than is ideal. Nice to see these car companies worrying about their delicate little flowers ha
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Erm... not sure why my comment was modded down, did I inadvertently offend someone?
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Occasionally a rogue moderator gets loose. We all suffer.
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You said something arguably bad about NY, or perhaps someone has a relative there who fixes potholes. Don't lose any sleep over it.
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Autonomous vehicles' Achilles heel (Score:4, Insightful)
Autonomous vehicles will have terribly expensive tire, rim, and suspension repair work in my state every year. Michigan has the worst roads in the nation, and avoiding potholes and subsequent vehicle damage requires illegal driving behavior. Examples that I can think of off hand include driving the wrong way on a two-lane road over a double yellow line, driving halfway in one lane and halfway in another lane, deliberately crossing onto paved shoulders, high-speed swerving maneuvers, and other behaviors that autonomous vehicles will probably not be programmed to do. Expect to pay $1,000-$2,000 per year for your autonomous vehicle, at least if you own one here.
Worse than money, though, is bad accidents. Potholes in Michigan cost the average person about $500/year with defensive driving, but potholes were so bad one year on a road I drove every day that they caused a wheel to fall off. Only because I had just turned off onto a less-used road was I able to stop safely.
I'd be quite upset if my autonomous vehicle was trying to be legal, and as a result caused a total and possibly risked my life.
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data collection and reporting fee. (Score:2)
That's a no-go (Score:1)
Remember when (Score:2)
Land Rover used to be an 'off-road; vehicle?
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Land Rover used to be an 'off-road; vehicle?
Unmodified, the average Land Rover will now walk all over the average Jeep, with the right rubber on... because most of the Jeep-branded vehicles are now car-based.
A real Jeep with a lift and some lockers, obviously, poops right on both of them at once.
Traffic flow and light timing (Score:2)
get the holes repaired (Score:1)
On top of sharing the location with other vehicles.
#1 report the hole to the local municipality
#2 log the fact #1 has taken place to a database
#3 check database for previous report
#4 if hole was logged > 2 weeks ago - book realignment with garage and bill to municipality
It will now become possible (Score:2)
To operate autonomous vehicles in Pennsylvania.
Actually (Score:2)
If they care, they know where the potholes are, because they have people who drive around working on roads all the time. They know where that stuff is. The trick is getting anyone to give a crap. Painting dicks on them or planting flowers in them seems to be what works.
The cars are going to look at the potholes both to dodge them, and to adjust their active suspensions. The new S-Class does the latter already, if you spend the big bucks on not just the car but also the proper package.
Oh, this potholes mapping system... (Score:1)
will [lurkmore.so] have [lurkmore.so] a tremendous [lurkmore.so] success [lurkmore.so] in mother-Russia [lurkmore.so] and their [lurkmore.so] *cough* roads [lurkmore.so] *cough*.
:-)
And who was whining about Michigan above, eh?!
Only for the US. (Score:1)
In more modern countries, where people pay taxes, there are no potholes, because you can sue the Administration for damages, if you hit one.
obligatory Beatles reference (Score:1)
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”