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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

From my understanding, this is required of nearly all 'self-driving cars'. A Slate article from 2014 stated that Google's cars wouldn't know a stoplight existed, and would simply run it, if it wasn't in Google Maps. And that a Google engineer said the level of mapping required by their cars at the time would be 'impractical' to do at a nationwide level.

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.

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> A Slate article from 2014 stated that Google's cars wouldn't know a stoplight existed, and would simply run it, if it wasn't in Google Maps

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 guess I did translate 'inefficient' to 'impractical' in my head. I am not certain I see a large difference though. There are arguably many roads where getting a constantly updating map is relatively doable, and many where it is not. Even if the cars themselves are able to update the map, how will they handle the trailblazing through an inaccurately mapped area?

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.

Its one thing, and expected, for the car to look for signs, but if self-driving cars all need perfect maps which I didn't know was a necessity then I don't see them being practical.

My understanding is that it 'looks for signs', if it expects them to be there. Obviously, it has to look at the stoplight to see what color it is. But it won't look at arbitrary space for a stoplight it isn't told exists.

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.

Give it ten years, and that traffic light problem may solve itself.

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.

It would definitely be useful for traffic lights to be beacons, but I think you might underestimate the government time scale for renovating and modernizing our infrastructure on a national scale.

That's a clever solution. Many lights have moved over to arrays of colored LEDs. The bulbs themselves could transmit data, similar to LiFi, to cars. The LED arrays could also have a LiFi receiver.

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.

Consider also: crossing guards, police pulling you or someone else over, emergency vehicles trying to get through (possibly in traffic necessitating that multiple cars move around to make way), drunk driver swerving into your lane, construction lanes which route you onto the shoulder, stoplight failure (power outage or otherwise) with and without someone directing traffic, city parking garages where a valet parks your car in a tight grid, events where you park in a field / on the grass (somewhere that would otherwise be "out of bounds"), camping, some of the things schools do inside parking lots...

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.

I agree, and most people don't understand the extent of parking being a huge issue. Driveways for houses, all of it.

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.

You'd be surprised. It's just not an issue. Google has already done it for Mountain View. Yes, any additional city will need to have an equivalent map built for it. Ok. Great! So that's what they'll do. It's a solved problem. Throw some time and money at it and voila.

In the aforementioned source, a Googler said that's impractical. A lot of things could be solved with an infinite amount of money, that we recognize is not solved because we don't have the money to do it.

Does that problem require better mapping or better reporting and data distribution by the relevant authorities that infrastructure has been installed/modified/removed?

In the future with self driving cars we would no longer require stoplights, cars would auto-adjust for other traffic.

This isn't a realistic consideration in any short-term future. That assumes 100% of cars on the road are self-driving cars which are talking to each other. That is decades away at the absolute best speed scenario. But self-driving cars won't make it to that point if they can't cope with the world we live in now.

How would you walk across the street then?

Hopefully, you'll just cross anywhere, and they'll just stop for you. Maybe we can figure some way to indicate you want to cross, so that they can slow down smoothly - as posted above, Google software can already read hand signs by cyclists.

Standing facing the kerb and looking at the traffic is a pretty good way of indicating you want to cross. Not sure how it would handle the other factor though: eye contact.

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