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Next week? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-cars-haul-people-weeks-41481011 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomou

Next week? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-cars-haul-people-weeks-41481011 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-c...

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Exactly. We went to the moon, and back, with a roll of parchment and a pencil strapped to a bunch of explosives. (Ok, a calculator and a rocket). In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. I'm going to say we'll see a lot more of this in the next five years.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Why not next year? It's only four turns after all. Bus seriously, driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon.
  - jack9 10y ago
    > driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon. You have that scope reversed. That's why multiple organizations have autonomous cars, which have been real world tested, to various success, and are being allowed to roll out (the whole derail of "they don't exist yet" is naysayer noise) without nine nines reliability. While the moon trip was only done ONCE across all of humanity's history and there wasn't a test beforehand. THAT was impressive, to the point of incredulity.
- tzs 10y ago
  > In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. That's similar to what I've wondered about as a good intermediate step between what we have now and fully autonomous self-driving cars that can go from any given place to any given destination given the address, even if they have never been there before. The idea is that most of us have various trips that we make frequently, such as to/from work, to/from a grocery store, to/from kid's school, etc., and maybe we could simplify the early consumer self-driving systems by limiting them to such trips. Here's how I imagine it would work. When you decide you want to add a route to your car's self-drivable routes, such as your commute to work, you put the car in an observer mode and drive the route manually. The car tries to identify traffic signs, traffic lights, lane markers, and other such things that it needs to understand. The car also records video of the drive. When you tell the car you've reached the destination, it uploads the video of the drive to the vendor that provided your self-driving system. It also uploads what traffic signs, lights, etc., it has identified, and a log of your control inputs. The vendor has a human watch the video of your drive, review the things that the car identified, and identify things that the car missed that are relevant. The human accesses whether or not the car can handle this route as is, or can handle it if some special cases are added, or cannot handle it. In the first two cases, the vendor notifies the car that it is now allowed to drive the route (and downloads any extra information they identified that the car needs), and the car can then drive the route in self-driving mode. Whenever the car drives the route in self-driving mode, it compares what it sees and identifies (traffic signs, lane markings, etc.) with those that were used when it was shown the route. If there are more than trivial changes, it asks the passenger to take over driving, and uploads a report to the vendor for review. Perhaps it also uploads video of the route every time it is driven, and the vendor runs software that automatically compares each to prior videos of that route, and learns what features normally vary over time, and which are more constant. The results can be sent back to the car to adjust its thresholds on a feature by feature basis for when it considers something changed enough to require human intervention.
- dilemma 10y ago
  >Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. Who's going to preprogram it? And then the billions other potential preprogrammed routes.
Certhas 10y ago
Quoting from the article: > But since the technology has not been perfected, the cars will come with human backup drivers to handle any unexpected situations. Getting those last 0.01% of situations right will take a long time.
- fastball 10y ago
  Pretty sure 0.01% success rate is still better than human drivers.
- carleverett 10y ago
  Will it though? Uber's Pittsburgh fleet alone will be collecting enough data that even .000001% likelihood errors will be coming up in a matter of weeks. And as people always like to point out in this debate, the minimum bar for safety (beating a human driver) is not that high. I don't think the software is the gating item for full autonomy. The production cycle of the hardware (the actual cars) is what we'll be waiting on most over the next few years.
  - trestles 10y ago
    I could see see something like Uber electric cars / golf carts where driving distances are small such as Sun City in AZ. Baby steps. Can't have a death in an accident though.
mylons 10y ago
did you read what they said or were you just looking to score a quick point? there's an operator sitting in the driver seat in those cars, intervening, from time to time.

Next week? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-cars-haul-people-weeks-41481011 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-c...

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Exactly. We went to the moon, and back, with a roll of parchment and a pencil strapped to a bunch of explosives. (Ok, a calculator and a rocket). In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. I'm going to say we'll see a lot more of this in the next five years.

rimantas 10y ago
Why not next year? It's only four turns after all. Bus seriously, driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon.
- jack9 10y ago
  > driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon. You have that scope reversed. That's why multiple organizations have autonomous cars, which have been real world tested, to various success, and are being allowed to roll out (the whole derail of "they don't exist yet" is naysayer noise) without nine nines reliability. While the moon trip was only done ONCE across all of humanity's history and there wasn't a test beforehand. THAT was impressive, to the point of incredulity.
tzs 10y ago
> In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. That's similar to what I've wondered about as a good intermediate step between what we have now and fully autonomous self-driving cars that can go from any given place to any given destination given the address, even if they have never been there before. The idea is that most of us have various trips that we make frequently, such as to/from work, to/from a grocery store, to/from kid's school, etc., and maybe we could simplify the early consumer self-driving systems by limiting them to such trips. Here's how I imagine it would work. When you decide you want to add a route to your car's self-drivable routes, such as your commute to work, you put the car in an observer mode and drive the route manually. The car tries to identify traffic signs, traffic lights, lane markers, and other such things that it needs to understand. The car also records video of the drive. When you tell the car you've reached the destination, it uploads the video of the drive to the vendor that provided your self-driving system. It also uploads what traffic signs, lights, etc., it has identified, and a log of your control inputs. The vendor has a human watch the video of your drive, review the things that the car identified, and identify things that the car missed that are relevant. The human accesses whether or not the car can handle this route as is, or can handle it if some special cases are added, or cannot handle it. In the first two cases, the vendor notifies the car that it is now allowed to drive the route (and downloads any extra information they identified that the car needs), and the car can then drive the route in self-driving mode. Whenever the car drives the route in self-driving mode, it compares what it sees and identifies (traffic signs, lane markings, etc.) with those that were used when it was shown the route. If there are more than trivial changes, it asks the passenger to take over driving, and uploads a report to the vendor for review. Perhaps it also uploads video of the route every time it is driven, and the vendor runs software that automatically compares each to prior videos of that route, and learns what features normally vary over time, and which are more constant. The results can be sent back to the car to adjust its thresholds on a feature by feature basis for when it considers something changed enough to require human intervention.
dilemma 10y ago
>Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. Who's going to preprogram it? And then the billions other potential preprogrammed routes.

Certhas 10y ago

Quoting from the article: > But since the technology has not been perfected, the cars will come with human backup drivers to handle any unexpected situations. Getting those last 0.01% of situations right will take a long time.

fastball 10y ago
Pretty sure 0.01% success rate is still better than human drivers.
carleverett 10y ago
Will it though? Uber's Pittsburgh fleet alone will be collecting enough data that even .000001% likelihood errors will be coming up in a matter of weeks. And as people always like to point out in this debate, the minimum bar for safety (beating a human driver) is not that high. I don't think the software is the gating item for full autonomy. The production cycle of the hardware (the actual cars) is what we'll be waiting on most over the next few years.
- trestles 10y ago
  I could see see something like Uber electric cars / golf carts where driving distances are small such as Sun City in AZ. Baby steps. Can't have a death in an accident though.

mylons 10y ago

did you read what they said or were you just looking to score a quick point? there's an operator sitting in the driver seat in those cars, intervening, from time to time.