Back then, as now, the big issue is that driverless vehicles have to deal with human drivers. Remove humans from the road, and the challenge gets exponentially easier.
Finally, we have reinvented the railroad. Amazing. I feel like the fact that we don't have automated railroads (in practice) should tell us something about the viability of the self-driving car. The problem for autonomous rail isn't even technical anymore, it's regulatory.
Your incredulity at the fact that trains still have human operators involved in any capacity at all, on the other hand, is spot-on. I'm with you 100% there. Every time somebody wrecks a train because they were asleep or distracted or texting or otherwise had better things to do, there is always a giant thread on HN full of postings from train experts explaining why the world would end if humans weren't involved in fixed rail operations.
It is indeed ridiculous that the same arguments -- whether they're valid or not -- never seem to apply to autonomous road vehicles.
I hear all this talk about better infrastructure, however what about the places in the middle of nowhere.
I see more of the Tesla, with self drive being in the future. Kind of like the movie demolition man.
We could do that in 1985. We used to test our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle (a Polaris Ranger ATV) at a horse ranch, and watched it climb dirt hills with ruts and avoid ditches. You profile the terrain ahead with a LIDAR and choose a driveable path. You can detect potholes, dropoffs, and ruts. You build a height field from the sensor data and run a planner.
The hard part is out-driving the LIDAR range and going faster. You can't profile terrain more than tens of meters away; you're looking at the ground at an oblique angle and can't see holes and drop-offs. We didn't have an answer for that. Stanford's team did; when the near part of the road profiled OK, and the far part of the road looked like the near part of the road, they'd assume the far road was drivable and speed up. We overdesigned the off-road capability and went too slow. But we didn't crash. The vehicle was eventually donated to UC Santa Cruz, where it was used for various projects for years.
The remaining hard problems all involve other road users.
I figure it's probably a low-rent version of the reason that the Space Shuttle had to be landed by people: just like astronauts wanted to feel useful, so too do the rail engineers.
I assure you that is not the reason the Space Shuttle, Trains or Planes require a human operator. It is the same reason cars do -- automated control is not sufficient that anyone is willing to put lives at risk to the automation. Especially when something abnormal could happen (most likely in a landing).
Although they're still generally all self-contained systems either underground or grade-separated (SkyTrains)
I now understand it can handle the terrain, thanks for the explanation that is pretty neat they could do it thirty years ago, just curious when I tell it to go to a house in the middle of a 20 acre property with multiple private roads, and I use the term road lightly, if it is actively going to search for a path or if it will have to have manual intervention.
I have seen google cars handle well mapped streets, just curious.
The knock-on effects are more interesting, in some ways. A nation where shared, autonomous vehicles are normal would likely have a totally different set of considerations in urban planning. Cars and spontaneous roadtrains can take the place of light rail and urban transport. Inner-city parking might disappear, and commutes could be much longer. You can imagine two effects: suburbs could really spread out for those who want space and don't mind a couple of hours each way reading the newspaper or snoozing, and cities can concentrate and build way up as you no longer have to build parking space into apartments. A more densely populated city with fewer dedicated drivers might have more political reasons to become bike-friendly.
Will people pay more for a more aggressive car, for one that perhaps gets you there that little bit faster by jumping stop signs and squeezing through smaller gaps in traffic. Will the Apple car refuse to let the Google car merge? These things will find new enemies.
we can solve that with expanding seclusion zones ?