So, in order to work, it needs a mapped area. They skipped the actual problems with driving in snowy conditions. I guess I'll have to wait a while longer for an actual solution. At least the didn't go the full GPS route since I've been on roads that are marked 10 yards away from their actual location.
Based on GPS + Lidar + other sensors, the roadway and surroundings will be mapped to within centimeters -- which should make navigating during inclement conditions fairly straight-forward.
These systems might fail on snowy roads that have never been traversed previously, but what percentage of driving is performed on roads with hundreds/thousands of cars passing every day? 99.9%? 99.99%?
(The only crash I've been in involved someone else losing control of their vehicle and crossing the center line on a major highway, which probably informs this perspective a little bit)
But this year, here we are non day 11 and only 3 fatalities so far! I'm hopeful we can keep this rate through the spring.
In the long term, 4 or 5 nines will probably better than most drivers.
Leaving aside malicious map data for now, high-speed roadways would tend to be well mapped, and low speed roadways should be discoverable in real time.
What could be very dangerous is bad map data in addition to a construction zone or road washout. I do think that places like construction zones will be the first to have V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) installed - to be extra sure that vehicles are aware of unusual conditions.
1) Pull over / turn around
2) Pass full control to one of the passengers
3) Find a longer/slower route with sufficiently good conditions/mapping
These cars require a lot more detail than traditional Google Maps data provides. And there's a huge concern about how they'd adapt to changes in the roadway which may have not made it to Google's servers yet.
Source, by the way: slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html
FWIW, a Googler has done a TED talk about having the car recognize police officers holding signs and temporary things like that, more recently, so they may have made strides in solving this problem.
But at it's core, the Self-Driving Car Project seems way too reliant on Google's cloud servers for my taste. I'd love to have a self-driving car, but it needs to be self-driving, not Google-driving.
I would not surprise me if we would eventually see every traffic light broadcast its GPS location, cycle pattern, and phase, either using radio or by modulating their light source.
That still is risky (hackers could hack the logic in a traffic light), but less risky than relying on one central authority to know what he whole world looks like.
Also, I don't think it is a good idea, but chances are police officers will have ways to stop self-driving car without giving visual signs.
To prevent hacking, the data transmitted by the traffic lights could be digitally signed using the public key of the jurisdiction. If 2 way communications is required, vehicles could sign their data with a vehicle key too.
Something like this would be a good way to securely allow lights to change their behavior when emergency vehicles or mass transit vehicles approach, broadcast road warnings to all vehicles, broadcast amber alerts. It could also receive reports from vehicles on average speed in road segments, reports of icy conditions (from vehicle traction feedback), reports of potholes or other maintenance issues, etc.
I just see far too many weird edge cases for car without a steering wheel to be feasible in the next few decades. Automated driver assist, sure. Taking over almost all the time, sure. But the dream of having it take you home drunk / take your kids to school without you / let you sleep on the way to work is pretty far off IMO.
Though there are some edge cases companies like Google might be able to do in the shorter term. An Uber-like service only needs to show you the closest it is able to pick you up and drop you off, and can largely ignore the parking nightmare entirely.
That muse be old. In their TED talk from last year, they had it spotting and reacting to cyclist hand signals, school bus mechanical stop signs, and even a police officer directing traffic at an intersection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg
edit: I see you mention this below.
Weird article, though. The author says:
> In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole.
but his previous article he links to says
> Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google’s vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation’s millions of miles of roads and driveways. Urmson says Google’s researchers “don’t see any particular roadblocks” to accomplishing that.
(and, incidentally, you quote the word "impractical", which appears in neither quote :)
I also hesitate to trust the TED talk, to be honest. Even some of Google's earliest videos of their self-driving car project seemed to portray a level of capability beyond what their cars could actually do without a lot of hand-holding.
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that humans do. I drive much better on a road with missing lane markings if I have driven on it before, and just like me, these systems will have degraded performance without the precompute.