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Some stumpers: snow (mentioned, no one has this figured out yet), big puddles/mildly flooded yet drivable road, tons of cyclists/pedestrians in urban setting (can you imagine the google car stopping for everything and trying to get around nyc on a busy day?), police stops (this is basically 3+ decades away if some kind of regulated police take-over tech is required, and doing an emergency stop is kind of retarded vs pulling over when safe), police/construction directing traffic by hand contrary to light signals, little stuff like backing up/moving over slightly to accomodate other traffic/people as necessary in a car without manual controls. Oh power/sensor/app failures/bugs, which seem much more likely than mechanical problems, leaving functional car stranded.
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May 30, 2014 01:33
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I'm involved in self driving car development and I have ridden in a lot of different self driving cars. Some are really good, and others were really bad! Right now advancement of the technology is kind of a insane pace, funding from companies used to be small but now the floodgates are open so everything isn't stymied by resources. On the bad side this causes bandwagoning, the last conference I went to there were like 6-7 non OEM examples and they were probably not good (one looked like they bought cameras for building surveillance and stuck em on the roof everywhere)Brigdh posted:Five years is insanely optimistic. It took Google five years of lobbying to get a couple states to do an evaluation study to see if autonomous cars might one day be allowed on the road for consumer use. I personally know folks who have left the field because of the political hurdles (both from government and manufacturers). I think five years also ignores the reality that Google's millions of hours driving without incident or whatever is all in ideal scenarios. They don't take the vehicles into "difficult" terrain (hills, tight bends, etc) nor into "bad" weather (rain, night). DARPA Grand Challenge (especially the first one) is way way old stuff. Plus, that was offroad, on-road is a million times easier and maps are available down to individual lanes. You got the radar thing backwards, there are radars that go out to 820 feet. LIDAR does a lot of lifting but the mapping lidar is very range constrained, and its a big problem. ExplodingSims posted:So are self driving cars the new tech singularity thing here? Instead of "I don't have to work out because I'll be able to download myself into a robot body" it's "All road problems will be solved in 5 years because self-driving cars Well regulations requiring cars to be 'autonomously augmented' are already coming down the pipe. For EuroGoons, this is very soon. Automatic braking for collision avoidance will be mandatory to receive a higher crash test rating, maybe already implemented. In the US, I don't think its going to take much longer. For fully self driving cars (if it ever happens), its not just autopilot but driving without you in it. Like if you are in the city and for some reason you got really far away from where you parked, your car can just drive to you. Or getting out in front of the store and the car just circulates or parks itself (we will all be fat).
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May 30, 2014 01:47
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Uncle Jam posted:I'm involved in self driving car development and I have ridden in a lot of different self driving cars. Some are really good, and others were really bad! Right now advancement of the technology is kind of a insane pace, funding from companies used to be small but now the floodgates are open so everything isn't stymied by resources. On the bad side this causes bandwagoning, the last conference I went to there were like 6-7 non OEM examples and they were probably not good (one looked like they bought cameras for building surveillance and stuck em on the roof everywhere) Again though, isn't that kind of what auto-pilot is though? Is there any real reason the car couldn't come with self-driving abilities and human controls? It's seems pretty simple to me to have a phone/tablet controls for you, IE you can start the car, have it come to you're location, and then take control from there. Or do the opposite, get out, switch to parking mode or whatever, and walk away. I don't really know a whole lot about the science behind self-driving cars, so I'm really curious to learn more.
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May 30, 2014 02:10
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That's another angle that's going to be fun. How much of a menace these cars are going to be to human drivers.
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May 30, 2014 02:17
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Liquid Communism posted:That's another angle that's going to be fun. How much of a menace these cars are going to be to human drivers. I dunno, I'm sure it'll be fun the first time a distance sensor fails when one these things is going 120mph on a crowded freeway though! 
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May 30, 2014 02:25
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How are police going to catch impaired drivers with antonymous cars? You know people are going to get loaded and make their Google cars take them bar-hopping, and it sounds like the law of the upcoming land is going to require that drivers be able to regain control of their vehicles if circumstances require. Being able to have my car drive me across several states sounds pretty nice though. Got to go to the potty? Just ask the car to stop at the next rest stop or nutcup-it since you now have both hands free.
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May 30, 2014 02:59
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ExplodingSims posted:I dunno, I'm sure it'll be fun the first time a distance sensor fails when one these things is going 120mph on a crowded freeway though! Yup. Also the hordes of people who will just flat be priced out of driving because an automatic driving system that isn't maintained in perfect shape is effectively suicidal. On the other hand, I expect my Jeep's I6 will still be running in 30 years when these things actually enter DOT road tests, so I'm not terribly worried. :p
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May 30, 2014 03:19
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ExplodingSims posted:Again though, isn't that kind of what auto-pilot is though? Is there any real reason the car couldn't come with self-driving abilities and human controls? You're assuming all autonomous cars that you and I could buy will look like that Google car. I would assume the opposite. e: Liquid Communism posted:That's another angle that's going to be fun. How much of a menace these cars are going to be to human drivers. Human drivers are already pretty good at being a menace to other human drivers 
Frinkahedron fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 04:23
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I didn't see this posted yet: http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/04/first-look-how-googles-self-driving-car-handles-city-streets/8977/ Looks like Google are doing pretty well on making their cars compatible with city traffic, there's some really neat stuff explained in that article.
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May 30, 2014 09:06
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Brigdh posted:One massive step forward is advances in what is known as computer vision. Computer vision is basically having a computer analyze the data from a camera and understand what it is "seeing". Such technology is necessary for reading speed limit signs. You can't dump a data base of every speed limit for every road, because the speeds change. Construction will take a 75 zone and drop it to 55. Hell, the signs even move so you can't plot the GPS coordinates of every one. This is an idiotic statement to make considering there are several cars you can buy on the market right now that will display the current speed limit of the road you are on either on the gauge cluster or on HUD. The new 2014 corvette is one of them that springs to mind. Again, the technology is already here and viable, there really isn't anything that needs inventing or maturing before we can have autonomous cars, the tech already exists.
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May 30, 2014 13:19
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Liquid Communism posted:That's another angle that's going to be fun. How much of a menace these cars are going to be to human drivers. At least they'll hit the brakes before rear ending someone, in a majority of human rear end accidents, the brakes are never touched or just barely pushed. People in accidents don't emergency brake. ExplodingSims posted:I dunno, I'm sure it'll be fun the first time a distance sensor fails when one these things is going 120mph on a crowded freeway though! The laws of the road aren't going to be changed to allow robot cars to drive crazy. Nothing will be going 120, and all stoplights will still be there. I don't even know where this came from.
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May 30, 2014 13:34
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HotCanadianChick posted:This is an idiotic statement to make considering there are several cars you can buy on the market right now that will display the current speed limit of the road you are on either on the gauge cluster or on HUD. The new 2014 corvette is one of them that springs to mind. I don't think his statement is incompatible with what you said.
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May 30, 2014 14:46
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Well, we can replace Kastein and Doccers' missus, at any rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV51BGIzkwU
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May 30, 2014 20:31
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Krakkles posted:I realize you're just citing one example, but I'd like to point out that it's a very flawed example and, well, it's exactly what he was talking about : We put human deficiencies into our perspective of these things. Yes in the scenario you propose, reading the speed limit sign is probably low on the totem pole of useful information. However, I've been driving through a construction zone at 4am every other weekend for about 3 months (when I would much rather be sleeping in an autonomous vehicle). There is no traffic on the road at this time. The speed limit has dropped from either 75 or 65 (depending on the exact section) to 55. While it would be perfectly safe and reasonable to go along at 80 in these conditions, my state requires that you obey the posted speed limit signs on highways, instead of allowing one to speed if it were reasonable like of the neighboring states. So, how fast does the autonomous vehicle go? If it referenced some kind of database, it would probably use the incorrect speed limit, and break the law. Sure, 4am in a construction zone might be considered as a contrived example, but if I were trying to build and sell an autonomous vehicle, I would make drat sure it could handle such a situation because if it didn't, I'd probably be liable. Not handling the scenario is likely to piss of my customers. Bumming Your Scene posted:but I would bet reading signs and striping was a cake walk. Surprisingly harder than you think. If you view a sign at an angle (such as if you are driving past it), its projection into a 2d space is distorted. A rectangle becomes a parallelogram for example. Last time I looked into the psychology research, we don't actually understand how the brain deals with it. Frinkahedron posted:I did my graduate research on computer vision for unmanned ground vehicles. With a modern laptop, I could process about 6 cameras worth of images at roughly 10 frames per second, and that was more a proof of concept for the cameras themselves and not so much focused on the speed of processing. The LIDARs used by Google and a lot of other companies spin at that rate, so we considered it a very good goal to hit for our dinky laptop. There's nothing wrong with throwing more computing power at a problem, it sometimes really is the best way, especially with statistical based methods such as machine learning. And luckily for us, computers double in speed every 18 months or so. I did a masters project with one of the top Computer Vision guys to modify a car I had handy to go driving around town and have the computer identify the speed limit signs. We had a couple dozen laptops running Condor with custom support from the Condor guys, and could only get 75% accuracy under 30mph, and 45% accuracy over 30mph. Computers stopped doubling in speed long ago. Intel already hit the thermal barriers in the P4 days, and the unconfirmed rumor from a college is that Intel is already hitting against the laws of physics for the materials they are working in. Throwing more computing power at a problem works, until you run out of batteries. Frinkahedron posted:You can actually read retroreflective signs with LIDAR, they're that good. (Both the signs and the LIDAR). Interesting, the LIDIR guys we go to have data showing the reflective coating on road signs does weird things to the data stream, at-least for ranging. HotCanadianChick posted:This is an idiotic statement to make considering there are several cars you can buy on the market right now that will display the current speed limit of the road you are on either on the gauge cluster or on HUD. The new 2014 corvette is one of them that springs to mind. Sure, getting directions in Google Maps tells me the speeds of the roads too. It's not accurate. Ignoring the construction example from before, I find it does well on popular roads like I-80, but urban is hit or miss (yeah that 25mph road is not a 45mph zone), and on the rural roads it seems to want to default to 25, even when the road is clearly marks as a 65. I'm sure the 2014 Corvette owners manual mentions that feature should not be relied upon, and the manufacturer is not responsible for any repercussions from you speeding because the display was wrong.
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May 31, 2014 00:54
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Brigdh posted:I did a masters project with one of the top Computer Vision guys to modify a car I had handy to go driving around town and have the computer identify the speed limit signs. We had a couple dozen laptops running Condor with custom support from the Condor guys, and could only get 75% accuracy under 30mph, and 45% accuracy over 30mph. Big push now in computer vision is moving to massively parallel systems: GPU computing, FPGAs, stuff like that, so I feel pretty confident in saying there's plenty of future computing power that we haven't realized yet that is directly applicable to computer vision. I'd like to see that paper about those speed limit signs though, that sounds very.... poor. These guys claim over 95% accuracy in their tests using a trained algorithm and a quick read through the paper looks like its pretty solid. The LIDAR claim is what an engineer I know said they've seen during some of their testing, they don't intending to read signs with a computer and a LIDAR because of the ranging issues you mentioned. (However, the newest firmware for the Velodyne LIDARs includes intensity values alongside the range data for each point, so it could be something to look at in the future.)
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May 31, 2014 04:00
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Brigdh posted:Yes in the scenario you propose, reading the speed limit sign is probably low on the totem pole of useful information. However, I've been driving through a construction zone at 4am every other weekend for about 3 months (when I would much rather be sleeping in an autonomous vehicle). There is no traffic on the road at this time. The speed limit has dropped from either 75 or 65 (depending on the exact section) to 55. While it would be perfectly safe and reasonable to go along at 80 in these conditions, my state requires that you obey the posted speed limit signs on highways, instead of allowing one to speed if it were reasonable like of the neighboring states. So, how fast does the autonomous vehicle go? If it referenced some kind of database, it would probably use the incorrect speed limit, and break the law. Anywhere in the northern half of the country, construction zones like that are going to be a daily thing from the very moment the ground thaws until it starts snowing... then the wrecks and manual flagging start for the winter.
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May 31, 2014 15:35
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