Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving cars

Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by melted on Friday January 15, 2016 @12:44AM (#10907460)

Because cars by themselves are NOT GOING TO WORK anytime soon. Rain, fog, sleet, snow, road work, garbage on the pavement, etc — all those things can't be handled by today's self driving car tech. One way to get around some of those things is make the roads assist the cars with things like machine readable guidance markers in the pavement, rfid, and so on. Those things will need to be developed and deployed on federal roads for there to actually be viable autonomous cars. That costs money and takes time. I'm just as pissed about the government throwing away taxpayer money on all kinds of shit, but let's face it, this is less than four days of our military budget.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by jack9 on Friday January 15, 2016 @01:47AM (#10907662)

> all those things can't be handled by today's self driving car tech

Some "can't be handled".

Just because Google or Honda's implementation (based on a camera) is geared toward a specific implementation, doesn't make it the best. Cruise Automation has the right idea with sensor arrays that make fog and rain a non-issue. There are lots of options.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by melted on Friday January 15, 2016 @02:17AM (#10907753)

No, it's an issue. Heavy rain and fog are even problematic for humans. Current systems use image of the pavement for precise vehicle localization. Pavement not visible? You're fucked. Pavement markings unclear? You're fucked. Road crew painted on temporary markings alongside existing? You're fucked. And so on and so forth.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by mod on Friday January 15, 2016 @03:36AM (#10908000)

If the pavement isn't visible, I'm fucked if I'm driving myself.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by gambiting on Friday January 15, 2016 @05:10AM (#10908293)

But you can at least try. You can make slow progress. You can get out, have a look around and continue slowly if needed. An automatic car will just go "no sensor reading, not moving amigo". Bird shat on your lidar sensor? Sorry, have to call assistance to get it professionally cleaned, otherwise the car is not moving. One of the lighbulbs burnt out? Sorry, the car is legally not fit for driving so you are not going anywhere, or alternatively the only destination you can enter is an approved garage.

I personally think this is going to be a huge problem with self-driving cars. They can't go anywhere if any of their sensors are faulty. And they need to have hundreds of them to work in all conditions. Ideally, you would want to have sensors in every wheel to tell you the pressure, sensors that tell you if there is ice on the road, sensors in literally every part of the suspension to monitor if you haven't suffered a broken coil or damaged bearing that could cause an accident - and those things break. Even such a simple thing as pressure monitors in modern cars are notorious for breaking down. Anyone who has driven a 5-10 year old car will know that there always is something broken. In cause of automatic cars pretty much every problem is a breaking problem that immobilizes the vehicle completely, and I think people will get tired of that pretty quickly.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by mod on Friday January 15, 2016 @10:10AM (#10909711)

What are your thoughts on the millions of miles self-driving cars have already put on the road without a sensor in every little spot?

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by gambiting on Saturday January 16, 2016 @10:02AM (#10915415)

My thoughts are - all self driving cars at the moment operate knowing that there is a human at the wheel, so they are likely to notice a broken suspension coil, rattling clutch, or deflated tyres(even if the sensor reports they are fine, which happens). For "true" autonomous cars the car has to know it itself - especially if it is to allow passangers to literally go to sleep, or even drive without them - so you can summon it from the other side of the city for example. The computer just has to know 100% of its own state, and that requires a huge number of sensors.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by melted on Friday January 15, 2016 @03:17PM (#10911807)

Notice how all those miles are in California where it almost never rains. It's still a hard problem, but it's much easier than driving in Alaska or Seattle. When I see millions of accident-free miles from those places, that's whe I'll be truly impressed, even if it's done with adapted infrastructure.

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Re:Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving... by monksy on Saturday January 16, 2016 @07:31PM (#10917598)

That's not entirely true: http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/11/ford-is-testing-autonomou...

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