Re:Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without a...
by modernshoggoth on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @08:32PM
(#4353206)
Indeed. The whole self-driven car isn't a new idea - various individuals and university disciplines have been trying the idea for the last decade over in Europe - it's legal to test these ideas on the road in some countries over there.
If you make the assumption that all cars will be AI, then traffic-handling becomes very, very simple. It's not obstacles or accidents that cause serious problems for traffic, it's the fact that you can't know what all other drivers are thinking.
If all vehicles behaved to a certain rule set then all vehicles actions could be predicted, and as a result designing logic to accommodate that is made much easier.
Re:Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without a...
by jeza on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @06:14AM
(#4354783)
That might work if the road system were entirely isolated from the rest of the world, but it's not. There are walkers, cyclists, animals, children and other random obstacles that might exist, none of which will ever be controlled by computers.
Re:Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without a...
by darkxanthos on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @09:40AM
(#4355463)
The idea of all cars following the same set of rules even if they are all AI driven is actually way too complicated. Bugs and misunderstandings of the standard would cause deviations that the other cars would need to react to anyway.
Re:Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without a...
by summerdown2 on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @05:53PM
(#4358284)
> If all vehicles behaved to a certain rule set then all vehicles actions could be predicted.
... or, potentially, hacked.
Re:Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without a...
by jlgreco on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @09:17PM
(#4353350)
They are already putting radars into higher end luxury cars as part of their cruise control systems. Granted, google cars involve a good bit more than those systems, but I am fairly confident that the usual trend of features trickling down into normal consumer cars will continue.
They have done this by attacking the problem from the 'Big Data' mindset which Google are intimately familiar with. Instead of trying to crack hard AI problems (computer vision being the most obvious) they are simply counting on being able to record and use enough information both before and during the actual driving that they simply avoid these problems.
From what I have seen this approach seems to be working. My real concern is it will not be economically viable to integrate the kind of sensor arrays they are depending on into a real car (2 radars and the laser scanner being the killers).