12 ms·

Ford says it conducted successful tests of driverless cars in snowy conditions

119 points by Futurebot 11y ago

jedberg 11y ago
Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever. Honestly it's a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we should want them. Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy climates.
- dubcanada 11y ago
  The problem is with humans it's fairly clear most of the time who made the error. It's either human 1 or human 2 99% of the time. With self driving cars it becomes software 1 or software 2... And at that point it's extremely difficult where to point the blame.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    do you care to fill in the logic between your start and end? I don't really follow the leap. It seems the tools we use to determine fault now, frail though they may be, are equally sufficient no matter which bundles of electrical fields are controlling things.
  - Bjartr 11y ago
    On the flip side, with software you have logs. It's much more clear what actually happened and when, who acted first etc.
  - dmm 11y ago
    (With the enormous safety benefits of self-driving cars) Maybe it won't be worth it to assign blame? It's happened before with no-fault insurance.
  - runamok 11y ago
    Why would it be harder? Most likely there will be laws to disclose telemetry, video, etc. in the event of an accident. Most likely an audit trail of what the sensor inputs were and what the decision made was, etc. More likely there will just be no-fault where both parties pay unless there is a spate of accidents that point to software/hardware issues.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  I was recently wondering how the insurance industry will respond to self-driving cars. When self-driving vehicles are a small percentage of the market, it helps reduce their claims. When the entire grid is self-driving, the industry will be much smaller. We're probably at least 40 years away from that, but it still should happen someday.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    The insurance industry would disappear. If you own and manage your own self-driving vehicle fleet, you're going to self-insure. https://usinsuranceagents.com/answers/3251/what-is-self-insured-car-insurance https://usinsuranceagents.com/answers/3251/what-is-self-insu...
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      Many people, particularly in rural areas, are still going to want private cars. They will get insurance. Leasing capacity with little delay will only work in regions with dense population.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Why do they need insurance? Poorly maintained cars will probably just refuse to go, so any flaws will be either deliberate tampering (which most insurances already don't cover, AFAIK) or the fault of the manufacturer.
        fweespeech 11y ago
        No system is fault proof and I doubt we will ever surrender the ability to manually override the system.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Maybe, but will any company be willing to insure the case when the user deliberately drives despite the car telling them not to?
- theklub 11y ago
  I guess you should want them, if you want to continue moving towards total loss of freedom and privacy.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    Or, you know, if you want to stay alive, since driving is by far one of the most dangerous things we do every day.
    - theklub 11y ago
      You want to live in a bubble, good for you. Give me freedom or give me death. I'd bet most of the people who are hard for these cars don't even own them, they just don't want to deal with taxi drivers anymore.
      - magicalist 11y ago
        > You want to live in a bubble, good for you. Give me freedom or give me death. You can still walk. They don't allow your rocket car on public roads today, so obviously there's some level of bubble you're willing to accept.
    - VLM 11y ago
      I pulled the CDC stats and it looks like eating and lack-of-exercise kill about 50x as many people as vehicle accidents. Also generic falls are only 4K behind vehicle accidents. Somehow poisoning beat vehicle accidents by 4K, I'm not sure how, maybe counting prescription drug interactions and allergies? http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age... It would appear the most dangerous daily activity is eating and not exercising. So your kitchen and living room couch are by far the most dangerous things in your life. Deep in the decimal points come poisoning, falling, and driving, all roughly the same odds. Someone else killing you is about half the odds of those three. Drowning is about a tenth the odds of driving although most adult drowning is probably outside the house and most people don't swim every day (although it is excellent exercise). On average you're about a fifth as likely to die of HIV than driving so the bedroom is probably safer than the drivers seat, on a very long term average, although HIV clusters extremely strongly into certain demographics, so bedrooms are basically safe for almost all of us and a death sentence for certain demographics. In summary, there are some daily household activities that are safer than driving, such as having recreational sex, but your kitchen and living room couch are maybe a hundred times more likely to kill you than driving, and its about equal odds for falls, poisoning, and driving. The odds are about 49 in 50 that you're not going to die in a car accident. (edited to add this is worrisome WRT death rates if people sit in self driving cars and stuff themselves with junk food while watching TV or something... the overall death rate might very well go up, even if vehicular deaths supernaturally dropped to zero)
- twoodfin 11y ago
  Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. They have an incredibly rich mental model, allowing for adaptations that would be risky or impossible to program into an autonomous driver. For example, when lane lines are missing or obscured, human drivers will often follow the car in front of them... unless they observe erratic behavior that might indicate the driver ahead has lost control. What's "erratic behavior" is a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at. Of course, there are areas like reaction time and feedback-based control where autonomous drivers will always be vastly superior to human ones. Which is why it seems to me that the safest option in the medium term is likely to be (as it is today) an increasingly software-assisted human driver. This is the primary reason I'm down on the chances for wide adoption of fully (or mostly) autonomous drivers in the next 5-10 years: Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative. The active participation of the human will fall off over time, but I think it will be a much flatter curve than many enthusiasts expect.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative." Unfortunately, there's a cliff where if you aren't stimulating the human enough, they stop paying attention. They can't help it. Their neural architecture is fundamentally structured to do that and merely trying not to isn't going to cut it. We can't have automated cars that 98% drive autonomously but beep when they need help, right now. This could work if the car can reliably predict when it is going to need help in 10+ seconds, but I'm not sure that's practical. (Which I phrase that way on purpose... maybe it is. I'm just not sure. Would certainly take a lot of work and some very conservative automated driving.)
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      To be able to know that it's doing something wrong or mis-reading things would require some deeper understanding of what it's doing (or at least a confidence score or similar). This is why it'd likely be important for s human to be overseeing it 100% of the time, to step in and swiftly make a manual override when the autonomy doesn't realize it's about to do something stupid.
- serge2k 11y ago
  > Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever. Well yeah, I want to be able to drive my car year round. If it doesn't work in the snow it's useless for months for a large portion of the country. Even here in Seattle the rain is a big challenge.
cschmidt 11y ago
I have a Mercedes Benz with adaptive cruise control, and was driving on the highway this weekend in a snowstorm. At one point, it basically gave up. It gave me an error message to the effect of "you're on your own now." It is a challenge for a human, I feel for the algorithm folks trying to test the obscured vision.
- cakes 11y ago
  How did the car alert you that you were on your own (I don't own a Mercedes)? I'm curious as to how it indicates to you a rather important message about your immediate driving situation.
  - krisroadruck 11y ago
    I don't have a Mercedes but my Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk has this same functionality and I did a cross country trip through northern america for the holidays. On mine at least it says something like "Sensor obscured, adaptive cruise control/lane keeping disabled. Please wipe off sensors." as well as making an audible ding to alert me to the message in my dash display.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    I don't own a Mercedes and I don't know how the car alerts you, but all that's really required in this situation is a ding and a message on the dash that says "Cruise control disabled" and then it turns off cruise control.
  - cschmidt 11y ago
    It makes the steering wheel shake or shudder, in a way that (to me at least) is meant to feel like hitting rumble strips at the side of the road. I think it probably dinged as well. It also turned off the cruise control, so I started losing speed. And there was an error message on the dashboard. So in all, I was well informed.
- Yeroc 11y ago
  Woah, you drive with your cruise control on in bad weather conditions like that? I was always trained to never, ever use cruise control in adverse weather conditions. Without having your foot on the accelerator to be able to quickly react to a skid or whatever just seems insane...
settsu 11y ago
I'm curious how this will perform in the real world since humans also cannot see the lane markings but, unlike the system described in the article, do not refer to stored or ad hoc environment mapping and instead operate on an entirely improvised "lanes by consensus".
- anorwell 11y ago
  Isn't "ad hoc environment mapping" the same thing as "lanes by consensus", more or less?
  - rubidium 11y ago
    No. Ad hoc environment mapping seems to imply the driverless cars will map the lanes have stored in their memory to the snowy road. Human drivers more or less invent new lanes by consensus. Have they tested a driverless car "push it out of a snow-bank" mode yet? :)
peregrine 11y ago
For anyone who's lived in areas that have regular snow storms you know that eventually mutli-lane highways turn into single lane tracks of clear road. Usually these tracks are somewhere in the middle of the road and everyone just sticks to them because a semi or snow plow cleared it for us. The method described is a really great way for car's to get stuck in snow drifts by trying to stay in lanes. Near term drivers will PROBABLY just take over in those situations but long term we'll probably need a combination of Lidar and Cameras to do this type of work.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  The "lane lines optional" nature of snowstorms definitely is going to require a leap of logic I don't soon expect self-driving cars to understand. Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't a good ally for this use case.
  - peregrine 11y ago
    Not to mention the composition or what might be below the snow. Snow and ice are by far the hardest conditions for anyone driving. I have no doubt a computer can figure it out and be better eventually, until then it will be interesting.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Electronic stability control is required by regulation in several jurisdictions (US, Canada, EU now or soon). From that it can be inferred that computers are better at some aspects of it already.
      - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
        I don't know what you think ESP is but it's purely a "damage control" type of driver aid and is only a layer of programming on top of ABS. ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways. It's basically automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS. All ESP does is utilize the car's existing technology to better do what the driver wants. It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the wheel hard enough to use up all available traction. It keeps the vehicle in an understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes). The point of this is so that the "AWD means I don't actually need to know what I'm doing people" are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he/she hits a pole he/she hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that's good at crashing "softly" The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant. If the used is trying to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it's thing and the ESP code is telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...
protomyth 11y ago
"Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." So, in order to work, it needs a mapped area. They skipped the actual problems with driving in snowy conditions. I guess I'll have to wait a while longer for an actual solution. At least the didn't go the full GPS route since I've been on roads that are marked 10 yards away from their actual location.
- lern_too_spel 11y ago
  This is just a one-time precompute step, something that is very common in software engineering.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    It better not be a one-time precomputed step since the roads changes constantly. I'm pretty sure I've never tried to precompute placement of items in a dynamic system.
    - lern_too_spel 11y ago
      Nonsense. Roads change very rarely compared to the number of trips taken on them. This precompute needs to be done just once per change, just like building an index that will be used for many searches. The road changes themselves almost always happen in less inclement weather. This is pretty much exactly the same thing that humans do. I drive much better on a road with missing lane markings if I have driven on it before, and just like me, these systems will have degraded performance without the precompute.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - manicdee 11y ago
      On the other hand, I have been confused by fairly simple changes to roads such as a two way street being made one-way (which a decent satnav would have been updated to know about as soon as the change was gazettes) or roadworks closing off a road that i regularly use (again, autonomous system would have been updared based on gazetted road closures).
eachro 11y ago
Does Google test their self-driving cars outside of California/areas where there is snow?
- cfcef 11y ago
  Third sentence of OP: "Google has also been testing its autonomous vehicles in the snow."
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  There are actually a lot of places that snow in California, you just have to get up into the mountains. There's a lot of snow within just a couple hours of Silicon Valley.
Animats 11y ago
It's not that hard. You use LIDAR to generate a topographic map of the terrain ahead. We were doing that 10 years ago for the DARPA Grand Challenge. For off-road driving, this is essential. A high-mounted LIDAR lets you do this. It's not just about sensing obstacles. You profile the height of the terrain ahead, cell by cell. There's a range limit on terrain profiling, though, imposed by parallax and the height of the scanner above the road. The higher, the better, of course. For a scanner 2m above the road, you can get good profiles out to 20m or so. This is enough to let you drive about 35- 40mph, which is enough for most heavy snow situations.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  How much impact do rain and snow have on the LIDAR? That seems to come up all the time, and I've never seen a real definitive dismissal of the concern.
  - Animats 11y ago
    What you need for that is a LIDAR with "first and last". You want both the first return and the last return. Dust, rain, snow, and fog will produce noisy early returns, and solid terrain will produce the last return. You can also range-gate, ignoring returns out to a certain distance, and move the range gate in and out until you sense something solid. LIDAR can be used to see through fog, snow, and dust to a limited extent.[1][2][3] Better than human vision or cameras. [1] http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-advent-of-low-cost-lidar/ http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-... [2] http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clear-line-sight-brownouts/ http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clea... [3] http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf
vadym909 11y ago
Given all car makers are investing in driverless cars- why don't they install sensors or guide-wires into roads to mark lanes, etc. the next time they are repaving/repairing roads? won't that be much safer than having to rely on cameras/radars .
- cbhl 11y ago
  This has been proposed before, and the short answer is that it is too expensive to install these things into all of the roads. Roads are typically resurfaced only once every 15-25 years, and in many municipalities, shrinking budgets mean that some roads are just outright being closed rather than being maintained.
  - frik 11y ago
    More like 1-10 years. And the snow plover destroy the surface of the roads, so you can't mount some device on the road surface or just beneath the surface. Even the sticks net to the road get destroyed from time to time by trucks or snow plovers.
- scuba7183 11y ago
  Sure, just got to get all car makers and governments to agree on a standard and have to approve the increase in cost
rwmj 11y ago
Give me a driverless car that only works on perfect sunny days, and the rest of the time requires me to drive it manually. That's still 10 x better than the car I have right now.
sandworm101 11y ago
Can it dig itself out? Can it hook up its own jumper cables? Can it scrape the ice off all those sensors? Can it scrape the ice off the license plate, windows, lights and everything else needed to not get a ticket from an irate cop? Can it stop to give a lift to a stranded person on christmas eve? It can certainly navigate and move in snowy conditions, but I can't see it actually driving in them.
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  Wow I find this really glass half full. Firstly I can see any of these being fairly easily solvable. We're still in the early days in this tech. It will likely take decades to really nail it. Secondly, even if half are solved, that's half of things I would have had to do anyway (well scraping ice of windshield instead of sensors). Thirdly I do recognise there are issues e.g. "Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." This would still be problematic in heavy snow and away from distinct fixed landmarks. But can we just appreciate the advancements that we are seeing year on year!
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    I think you have an autopilot-type system. This is driverless. That means nobody around. Nobody to do any of those things. So it is an all-or-nothing game.
- TillE 11y ago
  The ideal with self-driving cars is that they're basically a fleet of taxis which are either constantly moving or parked in some central garage. Airplanes deal with far worse sensor icing conditions every day. It's a problem that needs to be considered, but not a terribly complicated one. Cars have had heated windows for decades.
theptip 11y ago
Anyone happen to know why the LIDAR can't be augmented by radar or some other frequency of light in which snow is transparent (e.g. http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-fraunhofer/26844/ http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-fraunhofer/26844/)? I suspect there is an issue with update frequency or spatial resolution, but it seems like it could be a good fit for the sort of best-effort approach described in OP.
frik 11y ago
"But these sensors do not work well in snowy conditions, and the car's onboard cameras cannot see road markings obscured by snow. Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." Countryside usually there is a lot more snow on the street and especially next to the street. Detecting "landmarks" there will be hard. Also if you combine LIDAR with stereo cameras, you will find out like Mercedes dod in the 1980s that cameras have problems with low stand sun (light rays), common in winter season (evening). So winter conditions will be harder to solve.

119 points by Futurebot 11y ago

Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever. Honestly it's a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we should want them. Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy climates.

dubcanada 11y ago
The problem is with humans it's fairly clear most of the time who made the error. It's either human 1 or human 2 99% of the time. With self driving cars it becomes software 1 or software 2... And at that point it's extremely difficult where to point the blame.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  do you care to fill in the logic between your start and end? I don't really follow the leap. It seems the tools we use to determine fault now, frail though they may be, are equally sufficient no matter which bundles of electrical fields are controlling things.
- Bjartr 11y ago
  On the flip side, with software you have logs. It's much more clear what actually happened and when, who acted first etc.
- dmm 11y ago
  (With the enormous safety benefits of self-driving cars) Maybe it won't be worth it to assign blame? It's happened before with no-fault insurance.
- runamok 11y ago
  Why would it be harder? Most likely there will be laws to disclose telemetry, video, etc. in the event of an accident. Most likely an audit trail of what the sensor inputs were and what the decision made was, etc. More likely there will just be no-fault where both parties pay unless there is a spate of accidents that point to software/hardware issues.
ohitsdom 11y ago
I was recently wondering how the insurance industry will respond to self-driving cars. When self-driving vehicles are a small percentage of the market, it helps reduce their claims. When the entire grid is self-driving, the industry will be much smaller. We're probably at least 40 years away from that, but it still should happen someday.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  The insurance industry would disappear. If you own and manage your own self-driving vehicle fleet, you're going to self-insure. https://usinsuranceagents.com/answers/3251/what-is-self-insured-car-insurance https://usinsuranceagents.com/answers/3251/what-is-self-insu...
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Many people, particularly in rural areas, are still going to want private cars. They will get insurance. Leasing capacity with little delay will only work in regions with dense population.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Why do they need insurance? Poorly maintained cars will probably just refuse to go, so any flaws will be either deliberate tampering (which most insurances already don't cover, AFAIK) or the fault of the manufacturer.
      - fweespeech 11y ago
        No system is fault proof and I doubt we will ever surrender the ability to manually override the system.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Maybe, but will any company be willing to insure the case when the user deliberately drives despite the car telling them not to?
theklub 11y ago
I guess you should want them, if you want to continue moving towards total loss of freedom and privacy.
- freehunter 11y ago
  Or, you know, if you want to stay alive, since driving is by far one of the most dangerous things we do every day.
  - theklub 11y ago
    You want to live in a bubble, good for you. Give me freedom or give me death. I'd bet most of the people who are hard for these cars don't even own them, they just don't want to deal with taxi drivers anymore.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      > You want to live in a bubble, good for you. Give me freedom or give me death. You can still walk. They don't allow your rocket car on public roads today, so obviously there's some level of bubble you're willing to accept.
  - VLM 11y ago
    I pulled the CDC stats and it looks like eating and lack-of-exercise kill about 50x as many people as vehicle accidents. Also generic falls are only 4K behind vehicle accidents. Somehow poisoning beat vehicle accidents by 4K, I'm not sure how, maybe counting prescription drug interactions and allergies? http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age... It would appear the most dangerous daily activity is eating and not exercising. So your kitchen and living room couch are by far the most dangerous things in your life. Deep in the decimal points come poisoning, falling, and driving, all roughly the same odds. Someone else killing you is about half the odds of those three. Drowning is about a tenth the odds of driving although most adult drowning is probably outside the house and most people don't swim every day (although it is excellent exercise). On average you're about a fifth as likely to die of HIV than driving so the bedroom is probably safer than the drivers seat, on a very long term average, although HIV clusters extremely strongly into certain demographics, so bedrooms are basically safe for almost all of us and a death sentence for certain demographics. In summary, there are some daily household activities that are safer than driving, such as having recreational sex, but your kitchen and living room couch are maybe a hundred times more likely to kill you than driving, and its about equal odds for falls, poisoning, and driving. The odds are about 49 in 50 that you're not going to die in a car accident. (edited to add this is worrisome WRT death rates if people sit in self driving cars and stuff themselves with junk food while watching TV or something... the overall death rate might very well go up, even if vehicular deaths supernaturally dropped to zero)
twoodfin 11y ago
Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. They have an incredibly rich mental model, allowing for adaptations that would be risky or impossible to program into an autonomous driver. For example, when lane lines are missing or obscured, human drivers will often follow the car in front of them... unless they observe erratic behavior that might indicate the driver ahead has lost control. What's "erratic behavior" is a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at. Of course, there are areas like reaction time and feedback-based control where autonomous drivers will always be vastly superior to human ones. Which is why it seems to me that the safest option in the medium term is likely to be (as it is today) an increasingly software-assisted human driver. This is the primary reason I'm down on the chances for wide adoption of fully (or mostly) autonomous drivers in the next 5-10 years: Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative. The active participation of the human will fall off over time, but I think it will be a much flatter curve than many enthusiasts expect.
- jerf 11y ago
  "Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative." Unfortunately, there's a cliff where if you aren't stimulating the human enough, they stop paying attention. They can't help it. Their neural architecture is fundamentally structured to do that and merely trying not to isn't going to cut it. We can't have automated cars that 98% drive autonomously but beep when they need help, right now. This could work if the car can reliably predict when it is going to need help in 10+ seconds, but I'm not sure that's practical. (Which I phrase that way on purpose... maybe it is. I'm just not sure. Would certainly take a lot of work and some very conservative automated driving.)
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    To be able to know that it's doing something wrong or mis-reading things would require some deeper understanding of what it's doing (or at least a confidence score or similar). This is why it'd likely be important for s human to be overseeing it 100% of the time, to step in and swiftly make a manual override when the autonomy doesn't realize it's about to do something stupid.
serge2k 11y ago
> Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever. Well yeah, I want to be able to drive my car year round. If it doesn't work in the snow it's useless for months for a large portion of the country. Even here in Seattle the rain is a big challenge.

cschmidt 11y ago

I have a Mercedes Benz with adaptive cruise control, and was driving on the highway this weekend in a snowstorm. At one point, it basically gave up. It gave me an error message to the effect of "you're on your own now." It is a challenge for a human, I feel for the algorithm folks trying to test the obscured vision.

cakes 11y ago
How did the car alert you that you were on your own (I don't own a Mercedes)? I'm curious as to how it indicates to you a rather important message about your immediate driving situation.
- krisroadruck 11y ago
  I don't have a Mercedes but my Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk has this same functionality and I did a cross country trip through northern america for the holidays. On mine at least it says something like "Sensor obscured, adaptive cruise control/lane keeping disabled. Please wipe off sensors." as well as making an audible ding to alert me to the message in my dash display.
- freehunter 11y ago
  I don't own a Mercedes and I don't know how the car alerts you, but all that's really required in this situation is a ding and a message on the dash that says "Cruise control disabled" and then it turns off cruise control.
- cschmidt 11y ago
  It makes the steering wheel shake or shudder, in a way that (to me at least) is meant to feel like hitting rumble strips at the side of the road. I think it probably dinged as well. It also turned off the cruise control, so I started losing speed. And there was an error message on the dashboard. So in all, I was well informed.
Yeroc 11y ago
Woah, you drive with your cruise control on in bad weather conditions like that? I was always trained to never, ever use cruise control in adverse weather conditions. Without having your foot on the accelerator to be able to quickly react to a skid or whatever just seems insane...

settsu 11y ago

I'm curious how this will perform in the real world since humans also cannot see the lane markings but, unlike the system described in the article, do not refer to stored or ad hoc environment mapping and instead operate on an entirely improvised "lanes by consensus".

anorwell 11y ago
Isn't "ad hoc environment mapping" the same thing as "lanes by consensus", more or less?
- rubidium 11y ago
  No. Ad hoc environment mapping seems to imply the driverless cars will map the lanes have stored in their memory to the snowy road. Human drivers more or less invent new lanes by consensus. Have they tested a driverless car "push it out of a snow-bank" mode yet? :)

peregrine 11y ago

For anyone who's lived in areas that have regular snow storms you know that eventually mutli-lane highways turn into single lane tracks of clear road. Usually these tracks are somewhere in the middle of the road and everyone just sticks to them because a semi or snow plow cleared it for us. The method described is a really great way for car's to get stuck in snow drifts by trying to stay in lanes. Near term drivers will PROBABLY just take over in those situations but long term we'll probably need a combination of Lidar and Cameras to do this type of work.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
The "lane lines optional" nature of snowstorms definitely is going to require a leap of logic I don't soon expect self-driving cars to understand. Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't a good ally for this use case.
- peregrine 11y ago
  Not to mention the composition or what might be below the snow. Snow and ice are by far the hardest conditions for anyone driving. I have no doubt a computer can figure it out and be better eventually, until then it will be interesting.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Electronic stability control is required by regulation in several jurisdictions (US, Canada, EU now or soon). From that it can be inferred that computers are better at some aspects of it already.
    - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
      I don't know what you think ESP is but it's purely a "damage control" type of driver aid and is only a layer of programming on top of ABS. ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways. It's basically automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS. All ESP does is utilize the car's existing technology to better do what the driver wants. It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the wheel hard enough to use up all available traction. It keeps the vehicle in an understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes). The point of this is so that the "AWD means I don't actually need to know what I'm doing people" are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he/she hits a pole he/she hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that's good at crashing "softly" The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant. If the used is trying to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it's thing and the ESP code is telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...

protomyth 11y ago

"Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." So, in order to work, it needs a mapped area. They skipped the actual problems with driving in snowy conditions. I guess I'll have to wait a while longer for an actual solution. At least the didn't go the full GPS route since I've been on roads that are marked 10 yards away from their actual location.

lern_too_spel 11y ago
This is just a one-time precompute step, something that is very common in software engineering.
- protomyth 11y ago
  It better not be a one-time precomputed step since the roads changes constantly. I'm pretty sure I've never tried to precompute placement of items in a dynamic system.
  - lern_too_spel 11y ago
    Nonsense. Roads change very rarely compared to the number of trips taken on them. This precompute needs to be done just once per change, just like building an index that will be used for many searches. The road changes themselves almost always happen in less inclement weather. This is pretty much exactly the same thing that humans do. I drive much better on a road with missing lane markings if I have driven on it before, and just like me, these systems will have degraded performance without the precompute.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - manicdee 11y ago
    On the other hand, I have been confused by fairly simple changes to roads such as a two way street being made one-way (which a decent satnav would have been updated to know about as soon as the change was gazettes) or roadworks closing off a road that i regularly use (again, autonomous system would have been updared based on gazetted road closures).

eachro 11y ago

Does Google test their self-driving cars outside of California/areas where there is snow?

cfcef 11y ago
Third sentence of OP: "Google has also been testing its autonomous vehicles in the snow."
BookmarkSaver 11y ago
There are actually a lot of places that snow in California, you just have to get up into the mountains. There's a lot of snow within just a couple hours of Silicon Valley.

Animats 11y ago

It's not that hard. You use LIDAR to generate a topographic map of the terrain ahead. We were doing that 10 years ago for the DARPA Grand Challenge. For off-road driving, this is essential. A high-mounted LIDAR lets you do this. It's not just about sensing obstacles. You profile the height of the terrain ahead, cell by cell. There's a range limit on terrain profiling, though, imposed by parallax and the height of the scanner above the road. The higher, the better, of course. For a scanner 2m above the road, you can get good profiles out to 20m or so. This is enough to let you drive about 35- 40mph, which is enough for most heavy snow situations.

maxerickson 11y ago
How much impact do rain and snow have on the LIDAR? That seems to come up all the time, and I've never seen a real definitive dismissal of the concern.
- Animats 11y ago
  What you need for that is a LIDAR with "first and last". You want both the first return and the last return. Dust, rain, snow, and fog will produce noisy early returns, and solid terrain will produce the last return. You can also range-gate, ignoring returns out to a certain distance, and move the range gate in and out until you sense something solid. LIDAR can be used to see through fog, snow, and dust to a limited extent.[1][2][3] Better than human vision or cameras. [1] http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-advent-of-low-cost-lidar/ http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-... [2] http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clear-line-sight-brownouts/ http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clea... [3] http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf

vadym909 11y ago

Given all car makers are investing in driverless cars- why don't they install sensors or guide-wires into roads to mark lanes, etc. the next time they are repaving/repairing roads? won't that be much safer than having to rely on cameras/radars .

cbhl 11y ago
This has been proposed before, and the short answer is that it is too expensive to install these things into all of the roads. Roads are typically resurfaced only once every 15-25 years, and in many municipalities, shrinking budgets mean that some roads are just outright being closed rather than being maintained.
- frik 11y ago
  More like 1-10 years. And the snow plover destroy the surface of the roads, so you can't mount some device on the road surface or just beneath the surface. Even the sticks net to the road get destroyed from time to time by trucks or snow plovers.
scuba7183 11y ago
Sure, just got to get all car makers and governments to agree on a standard and have to approve the increase in cost

rwmj 11y ago

Give me a driverless car that only works on perfect sunny days, and the rest of the time requires me to drive it manually. That's still 10 x better than the car I have right now.

sandworm101 11y ago

Can it dig itself out? Can it hook up its own jumper cables? Can it scrape the ice off all those sensors? Can it scrape the ice off the license plate, windows, lights and everything else needed to not get a ticket from an irate cop? Can it stop to give a lift to a stranded person on christmas eve? It can certainly navigate and move in snowy conditions, but I can't see it actually driving in them.

Gustomaximus 11y ago
Wow I find this really glass half full. Firstly I can see any of these being fairly easily solvable. We're still in the early days in this tech. It will likely take decades to really nail it. Secondly, even if half are solved, that's half of things I would have had to do anyway (well scraping ice of windshield instead of sensors). Thirdly I do recognise there are issues e.g. "Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." This would still be problematic in heavy snow and away from distinct fixed landmarks. But can we just appreciate the advancements that we are seeing year on year!
- sandworm101 11y ago
  I think you have an autopilot-type system. This is driverless. That means nobody around. Nobody to do any of those things. So it is an all-or-nothing game.
TillE 11y ago
The ideal with self-driving cars is that they're basically a fleet of taxis which are either constantly moving or parked in some central garage. Airplanes deal with far worse sensor icing conditions every day. It's a problem that needs to be considered, but not a terribly complicated one. Cars have had heated windows for decades.

theptip 11y ago

Anyone happen to know why the LIDAR can't be augmented by radar or some other frequency of light in which snow is transparent (e.g. http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-fraunhofer/26844/ http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-fraunhofer/26844/)? I suspect there is an issue with update frequency or spatial resolution, but it seems like it could be a good fit for the sort of best-effort approach described in OP.

frik 11y ago

"But these sensors do not work well in snowy conditions, and the car's onboard cameras cannot see road markings obscured by snow. Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." Countryside usually there is a lot more snow on the street and especially next to the street. Detecting "landmarks" there will be hard. Also if you combine LIDAR with stereo cameras, you will find out like Mercedes dod in the 1980s that cameras have problems with low stand sun (light rays), common in winter season (evening). So winter conditions will be harder to solve.