Re:Will your driverless car kill you so others may live?
by Animats on Thursday December 10, 2015 @03:35AM
(#10709592)
"The obvious solution is to program the car to never take any blind corner, mapped crosswalk or not, so fast it can't stop on a dime."
In general, that's right. There is no reason for the vehicle to out-drive its unobstructed sensor range.
One effect, which the Google cars already demonstrate, is that their behavior at corners with obstructed visibility is markedly more conservative than when the LIDAR can see down the cross street. That's a good thing.
Having once coded this for a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, that's how you look at the problem. You're always plotting stopping distance against the map constructed from sensor data. You figure out how far it's safe to advance given sensor data, and compute a top speed from that. We did this every 100ms. If the map wasn't filled in with new safe space into which it could advance, the vehicle would slow down and stop at the end of the safe area. So it never out-drove its sensor range. Remember, this was for off-road operations, with obstacles and cliffs; we had to be very conservative.
Humans tend to get into a mindset of not wanting to slow down. Software doesn't have that problem. Constantly having a plan available for an emergency stop is not a problem for software.
In general, that's right. There is no reason for the vehicle to out-drive its unobstructed sensor range.
One effect, which the Google cars already demonstrate, is that their behavior at corners with obstructed visibility is markedly more conservative than when the LIDAR can see down the cross street. That's a good thing.
Having once coded this for a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, that's how you look at the problem. You're always plotting stopping distance against the map constructed from sensor data. You figure out how far it's safe to advance given sensor data, and compute a top speed from that. We did this every 100ms. If the map wasn't filled in with new safe space into which it could advance, the vehicle would slow down and stop at the end of the safe area. So it never out-drove its sensor range. Remember, this was for off-road operations, with obstacles and cliffs; we had to be very conservative.
Humans tend to get into a mindset of not wanting to slow down. Software doesn't have that problem. Constantly having a plan available for an emergency stop is not a problem for software.