Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides One Every Day

Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by Washuu on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @04:52PM (#17657008)

The issue is detecting the lines and edges of the road after it snows. Snow just makes it all an inconsistent white matte texture. Even human drivers have issues with it.

Heavy rain at night time can obscure road features to both humans and cameras.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by michaelchisari on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:19PM (#17658185)

If we did large infrastructure projects in the U.S. anymore, we could fit existing roads and highways with technology meant to communicate better with self-driving vehicles.

Our existing road signage and markings were made for humans. Instead of training software to use them, why not add ones it can better understand?

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by function_seven on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:33PM (#17658270)

You know how the account, transit, and check numbers along the bottom of a paper check use that weird OCR font? And are printed with magnetic ink?

That's what we should do with road signs and lane markings. Make them resemble the current ones somewhat, but also be optimized for a computer to recognize them even in extreme conditions. Not only with wider differentiation between signs of different types, but also using radio, UV, infrared, or magnetic cues. Lanes could be painted with metallic pigments for example. Even when snow covers the edges of the roadway, the car could read those lines and center itself.

All of this would be a change to what we already do. No need for extra equipment or drastic changes in infrastructure. Just update how existing signs and road markings are made.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by voxadam on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:38PM (#17658952)

> You know how the account, transit, and check numbers along the bottom of a paper check use that weird OCR font? And are printed with magnetic ink?

You're talking about MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) and the E-13B font.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by realbarack on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @08:47PM (#17658692)

I agree with you that this is a route which deserves investigation. My question is, how difficult is it to make something which works "even in extreme conditions"? I would guess that it's really difficult, particularly when one takes into account deterioration (asphalt needs to be maintained constantly, these things probably would be too) and monitoring.

That said, I don't know much about this space so maybe I'm just overestimating the difficulty here.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by Fricken on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:39PM (#17658311)

Part of the whole point behind mapping everywhere the vehicles go is so they can mark ahead of time the locations of signage and lights, lane markings etc. Now whether there's a bunch of Vehicle to infrastructure sensors all over the place, or carefully curated internal maps, there will inevitably still be unmarked changes in road conditions, so Robotaxis will still need to be able to recognize changing signage and lane markings, along with all the other dynamic elements on the road.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by mrep on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:25PM (#17658223)

No idea on the cost of this but I always thought it would be neat if we had heated roads (you can get your driveway heated). That would solve the ground visibility problem, the need for snowplows/salt and save tons of money that is normally spent on cleaning up/repairing accidents. It also might get rid of potholes caused by freezing ice saving on maintenance.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by function_seven on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:38PM (#17658309)

> No idea on the cost of this

Driveway systems require about 35W per square foot when operating. Imagine a 36' wide road, and you're looking at around 6MW per mile.

That's a lot.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by bluedino on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:59PM (#17659052)

Add more power and have the roads charge the car like in F-Zero

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by PeterisP on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:21AM (#17661197)

It may be done if there's a cheap mass source of e.g. geothermal energy. IIRC the main streets on Reykjavik, Iceland are heated this way to avoid cleaning snow, but that's because they're pretty much sitting on top of volcanoes.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by BurningFrog on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @10:09PM (#17659092)

There is work going on in that space, but I'm guess it will come to my local roads no sooner than a decade after it would have been useful: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/vehicle-to-infrastr...

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by Shivetya on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @08:36PM (#17658625)

We could simply mandate it that all "express" lane projects be marked to ease use of self driving cars. express lane is the new word for toll lanes. we could even convert HOV lanes to support self driving cars provided they are in that mode. the benefit is early adopters are more likely to pay for express lanes if that includes being able to go nearly hands free the whole drive and it is in a controlled environment with very limited access points.

which brings up something else. how to communicate to others that a car is under the control of the onboard systems. we have DRLs and third brake lights. So something at both ends?

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by gaius on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @01:20AM (#17659909)

technology meant to communicate better with self-driving vehicles.

It would 100x cheaper and better to just fit tracks and have trams. Not nearly as sci-fi of course but infinitely more practical and useful, if the goal is efficient mass transit for non-drivers

The whole self-driving thing only makes sense if it is cheaper than retro-fitting all the infrastructure. If it isn’t there is literally no point in it, just stick with human self-drivers and drivers-for-hire.

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Re:Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides... by Fricken on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:30PM (#17658243)

Here's a little gif Waymo posted, showing how they use Machine Learning techniques to filter out noise from snow that their sensors pick up:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Waymo/status/994091703379415042/v...

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