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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

You forgot the part about spending trillions of dollars on dedicated tracks that connect everyone's home, workplace, and shopping and entertainment destinations. Fortunately, we already have those tracks; they're called "roads."

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.

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I just don't understand, if the vehicle is totally autonomous how is it going to get down my friends mile long driveway that is little more than two gravel tracks with grass in the middle and find a place on his grass to park while missing all the ruts.

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.

"I just don't understand, if the vehicle is totally autonomous how is it going to get down my friends mile long driveway that is little more than two gravel tracks with grass in the middle and find a place on his grass to park while missing all the ruts."

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.

Considering that we can do this stuff on freaking Mars, I think we can handle your friend's driveway.

> 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.

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 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).

Well there are plenty of driverless trains and I've never heard of anyone avoiding them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Although they're still generally all self-contained systems either underground or grade-separated (SkyTrains)

That's a good point. When you have full control of design from the ground up it is reasonable to automate. I meant trains on existing complex tracks that were not designed from the ground up for automation. There are not trains navigating legacy systems, because that requires more uncertainty handling than our current automation is capable of. When the track and switching system and track vicinity are all controlled and designed for automation then it is a significantly less complex problem with respect to automation.

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