Great strides is not 'perfected' and I don't think perception for autonomous vehicles is a solved problem whatsoever. What is a driverless car to do if it slides out of position on the road and is now facing the wrong direction? Does it have the ability to know whether it needs to call for help, can safely maneuver, it's occupants are in immediate danger and should exit the vehicle (or not exit the vehicle)?
I think the most likely scenario is self driving cars won't drive in those conditions, hopefully those conditions don't develop while you're on the roadways or you'll be parked somewhere cold.
Will similar team exist for weird intersections in the middle of nowhere as well?
Will all these teams solve the problem of all the truck drivers rendered unemployed by "self-driving" vehicles?
Will all America's vehicles just wind-up instead being driven by tech support using joy sticks when the whole system goes south?
The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to be as good as humans.
Eg: An autonomous vehicle driving through snow backed by millions of miles of experience driving in snow is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time.
Which particular humans?
>> An autonomous vehicle driving through snow [..] is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time
Better than the worst human we can imagine? Better than the average human? Better than the average human who drives on that road at that time of year?
The problem is that you can't separate "perception" from "cognition". A human could drive a car reasonably well via a webcam feed, so does a webcam count as "solved perception"?
What GP means by perception being a solved problem is that existing sensors and algorithms produce high quality and reliable models in a wide range of environment conditions.
A webcam is a sensor device, the human observing the webcam feed most likely cannot construct a good model of the car and its surrounds, as they can't do things like shoulder checking or looking in the rear view mirror, which a good driver does frequently to maintain a model of where other cars are.
But then "reasonably well" for a human driving a car remotely via webcam feed is likely to be a far lower standard than we're holding self-driving cars to.
Why does the self driving car have to restrict itself to extremely subtle human nonverbal communication? Just put a loudspeaker on the outside of the car and have it announce its intensions clearly, yielding to pedestrians/bicycles according to the laws of the land.
Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem.
The biggest technical challenges are related to planning. So say you're approaching an intersection. There is a pedestrian about to cross, a cyclist in front of you and another vehicle waiting to turn left across your path. As a human, you understand that if you behave one way, it will cause the pedestrian, the cyclist and the other car to respond a certain way, but if you respond to the situation another way, it will cause all three to respond differently.
Our ability to game out scenarios like this is intuitive, but for AI to predict how it's behavior as an agent will influence the behaviour of other agents on the road is a daunting undertaking, particularly when taking into account the full scope of scenarios that need to be mastered before an autonomous can reliably safely navigate anywhere.