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Comment by fndjdh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's the case. In the greater Seattle area, roads have deteriorated to the point where it can be difficult to spot road markings even as an experience driver, and it's not unheard of for the markings to be completely worn away. I'm not sure about the rest of the country, but roads are painfully underfunded here.

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I always run into this issue in downtown Seattle. There are a few places (and one major one I can think of on 5th) in which the roads do this:

     |0|1|2|3|
    _| | | | |
       / / / /
    _ / / / /
     |1|2|3|
     |1|2|3|
     |1|2|3|
     |1|2|3|

Unfortunately, the diagonals are marked incredibly poorly, so most drivers starting in lane N will go straight and end in lane N-1. So if you drive according to the law in lane 1, you would almost certainly get sideswiped eventually by someone going straight in lane 2.

I suspect an AI driver would be astute enough to see the poorly marked lines, but most humans aren't! So the AI would frequently get sideswiped here.

> roads have deteriorated to the point where it can be difficult to spot road markings even as an experience driver

Yes, but apparently self-driving systems are doing a worse job than humans. But this only means the AI isn't quite there yet. I say AI, not sensors, because their vision is probably already better than human's.

It's a combination of sensors and AI. You'd be surprised by how low quality (wrt framerate & resolution specifically) the sensors used in production autonomous features/vehicles are. See mobile-eye's papers and products: http://www.mobileye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/StereoAss...

The newest reference date in that paper is 2009 so I suspect the paper itself is a bit old. I really doubt that video would be other than state-of-the-art when the whole system is so expensive.

Edit: Also that company makes add-on collision detection products. That is a different application than auto-driving.

I worked on these cars this summer at GM. I can't say what model of camera sensors we used for obvious reasons, but the resolution and framerate were not too far off from what Mobileye has in that paper!

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