How will those roads be digitally "aware" of stalled vehicles, pedestrians, animals, fallen tree branches, traffic cones, etc? Lane keeping is one of the easier problems. It's detecting and classifying all the other obstacles where AI really struggles.

No one ever talks about snow.

Human drivers here, have no problems navigating snow covered roads, even when the road, side of road, and everything is uniform white. When there are no visible lines on road, when there is no road tarmac to see, when ditches on side of road are filled with snow.

Human drivers can tell where to stop at stop lights, without lines or other metrics. Subtle clues abound, but I cannot believe current tech can navigate here.

At least dirt roads are generally brown and mostly vegetation free, although I wonder how even this would be handled in desert like areas, where it is flat, and road and surrounding land are dirt.

Lets not pretend that humans are great at snow. Lanes become imaginary in snow and best case the two track is roughly similar to the actual lane. The power of humans in snow is understanding that rules are more like guidelines and bending or breaking some are necessary at times.

They’re incredible compared to current vehicle driving assists which won’t operate at all when the road is snow covered.

They’re also pretty great considering the millions of miles travels on such roads each year.

> How to solve self-driving for cars: build digitaly aware roads

Who is going to pay for it? Are you going to rebuild all the roads, if not then what is the point since your system needs to work on all kinds of roads.

You dont need to rebuild the roads. This is a dead simple idea. You need sensors every x distances, and then use WiFi/mobile data to update cars of the model it should follow or rules of the road.

At this point though, you’ve started creating mass transit.

All good questions. IMO the government, cost benefit analysis needs to be conducted.

My perspective is inherently Dutch. I think the roads here get replaced quite often anyway.

While not sure of the value, I agree, a change at replacement time is essentially cost free.

Paving while laying RFID tag strips would cost nothing per mile, compared to the labour of pulling up and resurfacing.

> How to solve self-driving for cars: build digitaly aware roads

I can just imagine the scenes when someone hacks the digitally aware road to tell cars X and chaos (and potentially death) ensues.

IMHO, self-driving cars are solving a wrong problem, and if they work fully someday, might exacerbate a few others (congestion, pollution, parking).

Public transit, with diverse "last mile" options ( buses, bikes, scooters, heck, automated shuttles/pods on dedicated lanes, etc.) is just a better way of achieving the same goal.

You’ll love the art experiments which stall Tesla by pouring a circle of sand around them.

If someone decides to prank a desolate stretch of road with tens of stop stings every 5 meters, you are going to have some very broken self driving cars.

Plus all driving models are cultural driving models. A Tesla will break down on Indian roads.

Self driving cars will need data from sources other than their models. At which point you are creating mass transit with extra steps.

> If someone decides to prank a desolate stretch of road with tens of stop stings every 5 meters, you are going to have some very broken self driving cars.

Then some pranksters would end up with big fines or go to jail? Just like if they drop water balloons onto cars on the freeway from a bridge?

Sure, but thats irrelevant - whether gangs hunt autonomous cars to kidnap their owners, or people play simple pranks - they point being that humans know how to handle those situations and either avoid or ignore them.

No amount of driving focused ML/AI is going to help with that.

I don't think those are very real concerns. If you have roaming gangs kidnapping car owners you have other problems to deal with. But either way, it seems like the naysayers here for some reason just don't want self-driving cars to happen, and are finding any and all excuses for why they will never work. I'm saying that if there's a will there's a way. We've made way larger sacrifices for other modes of transportation in the past. I'm guessing these are the same people that would have claimed that cars are impossible because nobody would want to build tens of thousands of gas stations to accommodate cars etc. Compared to the changes we've made for cars, even designing our entire cities around them, the changes needed for self driving are minuscule. The benefits are maybe not the same but it's certainly the biggest revolution in transport since the airplane.

You don't have to tell the car what to do, you just need signals that designate the road as being "compliant and safe" for self driving.

Yeah, and when someone changes the signals to change the speed limit and remove the stop, no priority and curvy road ahead signs, and the car assumes all is fine and safe, it will be a fun time.

My opinion: replace all cars with self driving only, then you completely avoid the hard problem of interpreting other human drivers. And you can also let the cars communicate with each other, be centrally controlled and/or have assistance in the roads. Why would anyone want to have a non-self driving car. Maybe hard/unrealistic, but it would be super cool to see this as an experiment in a smaller city center to see what happens. It would bring so much opportunity for optimisations also around traffic flow, parking spaces etc.

im pretty sure the videos that got tesla to pull the beta were videos of tesla almost hitting obstacles/pedestrians not other cars. We also shouldnt pretend that pedestrians dont exist, or are 2nd class to cars. imo pedestrians are 1st class and cars 2nd.

And put cyclist and pedestrian lives at risk.

Replace them with robots too, problem solved.

> parking spaces

If all cars are self-driving you don't really need any parking spaces at all, do you?

I'd still want my car, and I wouldn't want it just driving in circles for hours. Less spots could be necessary in downtown areas, since a car can drop you off and park a few miles away. car ownership isn't going to disappear with self driving, it may reduce, but plenty of people have use cases that a taxi model isn't great for.

Yeah that's my point! You could calculate the amount of needed cars and have them in circulation, and they could park themselves in some underground garage somewhere when usage is low. It could be just one big fleet of self driving taxis, self-driving Ubers.

> How to solve self-driving for cars: build digitaly aware roads

Putting aside the physical aspects of replacing existing roads, how would a digitally-aware road work? A bunch of bluetooth devices? And in what schema would the road 'speak' to the car? Ideally it would be an open format, but who would decide upon that?

That's something I haven't thought about. I hand waived it with pretending that people be just as motivated to do this as they are with self-driving cars.

It is an interesting question though! I think of a few things that could be done quite easily:

Communication can happen via low latency with relatively little data. I wouldn't know what's best for that.

* Roads can broadcast. Roads can listen through sensors and determine the position of every car.

* Cars can broadcast. Cars can listen.

* Things can go wrong. There'd be huge demand for any distributed system engineer :P

A use-case sketch:

A road can determine if it almost goes out of bounds. A road can determine if two cars are about to collide, but so could two cars.

So this would work well in places where there are only roads and cars (e.g. highways and "road only" type of roads -- i.e. no bicycle lanes).

Cyclists can communicate as well. They need to chip their bike.

Pedestrians can communicate as well. They need to chip their coat. Though I'm not happy with that solution (what if the coat gets lost?).

Anyways that's my rough sketch. I'd need to research the technologies needed for this.

This would make for a fun systems design interview.

Whomever wants to brainstorm with me on it, feel free to email me. I don't think I'm particular talented in this area but I can be a rubber ducky.

I liked the idea of simply using mobile data services to update cars from a network. Keep a series of cat eyes or pressure monitors on regular tarmac roads, have a collector station every few meters and use that to relay information.

In areas without network you dont use self driving tech.

Driving data is cultural data, its not some natural phenomenon which is clean and periodic. If a truck transporting cows breaks down and there’s a herd of cattle running all over the highway, I seriously doubt the models are going to perfectly handle that situation.

Level 5 self driving is impossible, but with road data and external coordination, we can achieve the same effect.

We have wild deer crossing the roads here. Will you ask them to chip their antlers?

How else will they get groceries?

It’s funny how unpopular this argument was. There is no way level 5 self driving works, unless you are aware of anomalies beyond what the models are prepared for.

> How to solve self-driving for cars: build digitaly aware roads

This is going to happen. It will be proprietary. Think roads with DRM.