This gets made worse then construction strips old lines and draws new ones a couple feet over. The old ones in dry weather are barely visible, but in watery weather, they hold water differently than normal road surfaces.. meaning there are now lines which, due to different water levels of normal road surfaces, form visible lane lines competing with the real lane lines.
The reflective bumps are a huge boon for me when they exist. I'm always surprised more accidents aren't caused by poorly visible lines.
If we need to repaint all roads to make them work for auto-driving cars, we might as well just move to one of those simple systems like where a robot follows a pre-drawn line on a piece of paper. Maybe throw some bar codes in there so the car knows where it is.
If the cars can't deal with environments that even humans can, I'm not sure what the point is anymore. I expect a self-driving car can see through things like fog and darkness better than a human.
Anyone who has driven through road construction and had to follow temporary lines while ignoring blacked out lines knows this struggle.
No I'm saying the section in the video is in need of repainting even for humans.
Without a sensor-based roadway, I'm not sure how systems like this can be possible. For instance, very-wet roads at night have so much glare from headlights it's impossible to someones see the markings on the road, especially without any reflective/haptic coatings.
With this, we have AI having to predict when it does and when it doesn't know where the road is. A sensor approach could be akin to a railway, and the rails are either detected or not.
A merge of the two methods would still be needed of course, to detect obstructions in the roadway, navigate safely in the emergency event that no sensors are available, etc.
It would also be cool because we could define when and where those new roads are available. You wouldn't be able to drive AI to the Oregon Coast and have it suddenly fail on an untested cliffside. The road is either AI friendly or not.
I'm sure there's flaws in this line of thought, I'm merely speculating.
This same pattern of trying to make a perfect system instead of multiple layers by acknowledging lack of perfection exists quite a bit in tech.
Clear lane markings are not a requirement just for autopilot.