Cadillac To Release Self-Driving Cars By 2015
inquisitr.com
inquisitr.com
That sounds like a severely limited AI.
I wonder if some of these half solutions won't actually be worse for safety. Is someone a great deal more likely to completely shift attention from the road if the car is driving? Maybe even by dozing off? When that happens, how long will it take to regain sufficient focus if the white lines disappear on a stretch of road? How robust is the AI for a car that could be fooled by deceptively-painted lines?
Google's car is much more sophisticated. Given what Google has demonstrated, I'd rather we skip any intervening generations of half-self-driving cars. These pseudo driving cars seem just as likely to give the whole AI vehicle concept a black eye and set the industry back 10 years.
The principle road tracking was to look for any sets of lines that moved in parallel. The primitive hardware was a series of horizontal line scan cameras aimed at increasing distances in front of the car and a simple sideways shift+correlation to decide which direction.
This way that tracked not just white lines, but tire tracks, kerbs, road wear, roadside barriers etc. The main problem we had was on a clean unmarked newly laid road surface that was perfectly uniform.
There is a highway I commute on daily which has been undergoing roadworks for the last 3years and has so many painted out lines, repairs, temporary markings, filled in trenches etc that in the rain I have no idea where the lanes are.
But it turns out that something like 90% of miles traveled are on highways.[1] So what if you just limit it to limited-access highways recognized by the GPS? That covers a huge chunk of miles traveled, and you have actual vehicles out there a lot earlier, which will teach you a lot. And highways kill (I think) tens of thousands of people a year, so getting more reliable drivers out there can't come any too soon.
I'm also thinking that the AI will have to be pretty damn robust to go into production, whatever this article says. Whether or not there are painted lines, it will have to share the road with other cars, so it will have to be pretty smart in order to do anything at all.
[1] https://engineering.purdue.edu/~flm/CE%20361_files/chapter1_...
This release contains "forward-looking-statements".
Forward-looking statements can generally be identified
by words such as "believe," "appears," "may," "could,"
"will," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend,"
"should," "plan," "expect," and other words and terms of
similar meaning in connection with any discussion of
projections, future performance or expectations, beliefs,
plans or objectives for future operations (including
statements of assumption underlying or relating to any of
the foregoing). Actual results may differ materially from
those reflected in these forward-looking statementsIf there is anything I've learned in my career it is that building systems that are 100% completely error-free is pie in the sky thinking even in moderately controlled environments. Suffice it to say, I will be a very late adopter although I think the efforts are very exciting.
I would say it is similar in essence to air travel. Even though commercial airline travel is way safer than driving, I'm pretty sure more people fear airline travel due to the element of having no control. Unfortunately when they release probably any automated car crash, as rare as it may be, will be played up as death by machine.
I think they will have to really play up the ability to easily override the automation (even though I doubt it will mitigate automated car crashes in that once you get used to it being successful you'll probably be reading a book when the override is actually needed)
Old person hits gas instead of break, crashes into robot car. What would a human do differently? teenager runs red light, gets tboned by robot car. What would a human do differently? Child runs in front of car. What would a human do differently?
It might take a few years, but thousands of hours of video of humans making avoidable mistakes will probably change people's minds.
The most important barriers to adoption are social, not technological, and that means that even one major catastrophe can cause a wave of backlash, regardless of whether or not it's justified.
And that's why it needs to be rock solid.
I think—and hope—we'll be surprised at how quickly we acclimate to magic. Sure, we'll be completely freaked out by letting go of the steering wheel. Then we'll be irritated at how our car thought the leaves blowing across the road were an obstacle. Finally, we'll wonder how we ever survived our own driving and we'll mourn for those that didn't.
With the amount of data required for self-driving cars, the entire situation could be recorded - things external to the car. It would be like the airplane black box, but for all the vehicles in close proximity too.
We don't really think about it like this, but things like anti-lock brakes and automatic transmissions are all on this same continuum towards "driverless" cars.
A next step might be something like adaptive cruise control: your CC is set at 60 but the car ahead of you slows rapidly and your car automatically applies the brakes.
We already have that.
Ford Taurus introduced a 'parent key/child key' concept a few years ago that did things like limit stereo volume and top speed. This takes it one further.
No fretting about stupid accidents! No fretting about drunk driving!
"Sorry son, you can't ride with Johnny - he still has a manually controlled car."
But it leaves me deeply suspicious. Having some insight into what it took the team at Google to get theirs to work I find that unless GM starts with that team, and their patent portfolio, this will be be a longer term thing. I'd put money on a self driving car from someone before 2020 but 2015 seems a bit early.
In spite of Google's fudging the delicate bits (see my comment on the drive thru non-experience) they have done a tremendous amount of work that a car company would be hard pressed to duplicate quickly. That and Lidar or their functional equivalent systems are still darn expensive.
That being said, I think it is AWESOME that we've got a major car company putting this stake firmly in the ground. If nothing else it will motivate a response from the others.
I have totally got to stop spending too much time here :-)
2 Weeks ago, I would have agreed with you entirely. It seems unimaginable that GM could even have a working prototype in 3 years.
But last week I found out there's companies working on mining astroids for real.... so now i'm just going to sit back with a healthy skepticism, i have no idea what's possible in terms of years any more.
I know nothing more about them but it is evidence that people at car companies have not been totally ignoring the concept.
You write that as if Google's team is the only one in the world working on this, or far ahead of all others. Their PR department may be superior, but I do not think they are the only ones; many car companies have been working on this for years, sometimes decades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History). I cannot judge whether they are far ahead; please show data proving that if you know more.
So no, I do not think that that shows Google is far ahead of the field. Or did Google hire both teams? Even that would not totally convince me., as it looks as if only US teams took part in those races.
With all manufacturers pursuing their own AI, though, I wonder if we'll have a future that echoes the past. If, say, Volvo has sub-optimal testing, perhaps 'ovlov' (an old Usenet joke - Volvo in your mirrors) will again become known as the bane of motorcyclists. Will Toyota launch ads bragging about their higher AI safety rating than Volvo?
Assuming the algorithm is something like - steer away from another vehicle that appears in your lane - your could 'herd' lines of Volvos into each other.
Ob biker joke - what's the 2nd most dangerous thing on the road? A Volvo driver in a hat.
What's the most dangerous ? A Volvo driver without a hat - because he is driving around trying to remember where he left it.
I know far too many people who have gotten broken bones by having someone open their door unexpectedly into the bike lane.
I hope that was sarcasm on your part...
I agree that this is better left to a warning indicator.
I try to pull as close as I can to block bikes from getting between me and the curb and still have idiots trying to do 20mph in an impossibly tiny gap.
Disclaimer: I avoid the issue by travelling in the center of the auto traffic lane. If you don't like that, tough luck.
That's pretty low hanging fruit and it would definitely improve traffic safety immediately. And it doesn't even require sexy AI software.
Also, i think they'll be heavily weighted towards "safety" and not "excitement". They might drive slower, and stop more often than strictly required, but not causing lawsuits must be priority 1
No more drunk drivers, no more mothers dealing with their kids while driving, city buses whose drivers don't need breaks, rental cars that drive themselves from their lot to your house (they pick you up instead of you picking them up), 100% automated home food/parcel delivery, etc.
The future is awesome.
At least you never see any driver behind the wheel, perhaps a pair of hands or the top of a hat but never any driver.