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The history of self driving cars shows that it is not an easy task. We've been working on this for over 15 years. I was on a self driving car team during 2008-2

The history of self driving cars shows that it is not an easy task. We've been working on this for over 15 years. I was on a self driving car team during 2008-2010. We won multiple intercollegiate competitions. At that time I was certain it would be 20+ years before we had something that could drive on the roads. The progress has been spectacular.

dkonofalski 10y ago
No, programming the self-driving car is not an easy task. A car that's already been programmed, though, is definitely going to be safer than a human driver and driving for the computer is an easy task.
- inimino 10y ago
  > definitely going to be safer than a human driver That's just ridiculous. It is going to be safer in some cases and less safe in others, and obviously it depends on the system and the driving conditions. To say that a computer is necessarily a better driver is just science fiction until we have solid data showing that to be the case.
cr0sh 10y ago
> We've been working on this for over 15 years. Over 25 years, actually - CMU's ALVINN (1989) was one of the first full-sized vehicle implementations: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c... It was preceded by an E-MAXX based RC car system called DAVE (DARPA Autonomous Vehicle). CMU also worked on an investigated other systems, going back to 1984 or so: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/ They had an interesting system called the Terragator, from at least 1983; I can't find a paper about this system, though I know they exist - there is a video, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beGRM9ZmWlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beGRM9ZmWlI One might consider the Stanford Cart as an earlier example (I believed it used computer vision techniques - and was really slow at computing the "next move"): https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm (side note: As part of SAIL, the Cart was instrumental in paving the way for Thrun's Stanley - which won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and ultimately led to Google's efforts in self-driving cars) ALVINN was unique in that it used a (simple compared to today's CNNs and deep learning) neural network (and a WARP systolic array): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARP_(systolic_array) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARP_(systolic_array) ...coupled to a camera to digitize and model/learn the road features for driving, while "watching" the human driver (early form of "behavioral cloning" - but it wasn't termed as such in the various papers you can find about ALVINN). Interestingly, during the ML Class in 2011 (which I participated in), one of the students - after we were shown several times how ALVINN worked - decided to replicate the system using "modern hardware": http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/ http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/ We've really come a long way...

dkonofalski 10y ago

No, programming the self-driving car is not an easy task. A car that's already been programmed, though, is definitely going to be safer than a human driver and driving for the computer is an easy task.

inimino 10y ago
> definitely going to be safer than a human driver That's just ridiculous. It is going to be safer in some cases and less safe in others, and obviously it depends on the system and the driving conditions. To say that a computer is necessarily a better driver is just science fiction until we have solid data showing that to be the case.

cr0sh 10y ago

> We've been working on this for over 15 years. Over 25 years, actually - CMU's ALVINN (1989) was one of the first full-sized vehicle implementations: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c... It was preceded by an E-MAXX based RC car system called DAVE (DARPA Autonomous Vehicle). CMU also worked on an investigated other systems, going back to 1984 or so: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/ They had an interesting system called the Terragator, from at least 1983; I can't find a paper about this system, though I know they exist - there is a video, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beGRM9ZmWlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beGRM9ZmWlI One might consider the Stanford Cart as an earlier example (I believed it used computer vision techniques - and was really slow at computing the "next move"): https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm (side note: As part of SAIL, the Cart was instrumental in paving the way for Thrun's Stanley - which won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and ultimately led to Google's efforts in self-driving cars) ALVINN was unique in that it used a (simple compared to today's CNNs and deep learning) neural network (and a WARP systolic array): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARP_(systolic_array) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARP_(systolic_array) ...coupled to a camera to digitize and model/learn the road features for driving, while "watching" the human driver (early form of "behavioral cloning" - but it wasn't termed as such in the various papers you can find about ALVINN). Interestingly, during the ML Class in 2011 (which I participated in), one of the students - after we were shown several times how ALVINN worked - decided to replicate the system using "modern hardware": http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/ http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/ We've really come a long way...