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The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates provided by the government or whoever is responsible for road safe

The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates provided by the government or whoever is responsible for road safety, free of charge (you're not directly paying for having signs on the road, why would you have to pay for an electronic version of that?). Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous card do, so why not use it?

castis 9y ago
Introducing a single point of failure (1 database, across the internet), organized by a largely complex system (the DoT, possibly) to cope with an edge case doesn't feel like a very elegant solution.
- pimmen 9y ago
  A more costly, less elegant solution whose problem is already shared by street signs in general (meaning we could plan for it) would be RFID tags or something that tells the computer what sign this is if it can't read the sign. You could also use this for training, so it learns to filter away poorly drawn swastikas from the sign. An attack on something like this would scale very poorly, as you would need physical access to all street signs. Issuing RFID to a street sign would be just another step along the manufacturing process of the sign, or as a step to the mounting of the sign. I can't take credit for this idea though, it's already been [explored in a paper](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-41647-7_15 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-41647-7_...).
  - tyingq 9y ago
    >An attack on something like this would scale very poorly, as you would need physical access to all street signs I wouldn't underestimate the eventual legions of unemployed truck drivers. They will probably lose eventually, but I expect a spirited effort.
    - pimmen 9y ago
      They would be most successful where population and sign density is high, which would be the cities. During such an attack, public transport could move around people while the authorities would take care of the attackers. The problem for them is that where they would cause the most harm, rural areas (since they are in most dire need of supplies a few towns away and don't have any good alternatives to cars), is where such an attack would be the hardest to implement. Canada, Australia, Iceland and Alaska has many roads where vital street signs can be tens of miles apart from each other, as well any actual people who might be effected by this. Also, demographic movements is working to their disadvantage; more and more people everyday are moving to large cities.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        In the US they can focus on just the interstates. And, they are unemployed, already used to long boring trips, and have established communication networks between them. Oh, and disenfranchised friends at the various rural truck stops and motels that will also be razed by self driving tech.
    - kbos87 9y ago
      This actually doesn't seem that far fetched. Ex-drivers who are angry and have plenty of time on their hands out at night picking the RFID tags out of stop signs. Another scenario is more of a slow and steady war. I'd expect that autonomous vehicles will occasionally be alone and unoccupied, which makes them a tempting and defenseless target. You wouldn't even need to do any physical damage to disable them - just a little electrical tape over their sensors, or some chocks under their tires. Soon, the autonomous trucking cos have to employ some of the ex-truck drivers to go around re-enabling their vehicles. And of course, those ex-truck drivers are in cahoots with the disbalers. That could certainly drive down their savings on labor costs.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  This isn't a single point of failure by any stretch of the imagination. Waze and other navigation systems have a database of signs, road speeds and traffic enforcement cameras. I don't know about the US but there are places where signs are in a database already. This can be crowd sourced just like anything else. Google Street View already has a pretty good DB to start from.
hk__2 9y ago
> Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous car[s] do, so why not use it? Because you shouldn’t need to connect to the Internet and resolve GPS coordinates to know there’s a sign 50 meters away. If autonomous cars can’t "see" signs, let make them "see-able" with e.g. small radio transmitters along the road.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  The issue is that upgrading every sign with a transmitter is costly, would require power and ongoing maintenance (not to mention vandalism - a sign is just metal and usually pretty resistant, but any electronics will be destroyed by vandals in no time). An online database that can be cached (so you aren't in trouble if your network drops while you go through a tunnel or similar) is much cheaper to implement than upgrading physical signs.
  - pimmen 9y ago
    Since the sign is just metal, it could serve as the antenna. Bury the transmitter beneath the ground, there you could also hook it up to the power grid (unless you use the sign's surface to act as a solar panel). I would like to see vandals mess with that. However, it ain't cheap and simple to implement, I agree with that. In countries like Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada and Australia they probably have the means to outfit their cities since they have the wealth to do it, but the rural areas would be a real challenge since they are so sparsely populated even when the money is there. In contrast to when these countries pioneered the implementation of the Internet, there's nothing like the phone network to piggy back this time.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Passive or Semi-Active RFID isn't expensive. All signs can be a victim of vandalsim. I think computer vision, a sign DB an IR water marked QR code and some RFID combined can produce a pretty robust and tamper reselient system.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
unityByFreedom 9y ago
> The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates Why does everyone think self driving cars can use GPS to identify sign locations? GPS is not accurate enough to do that, and the labeling would need to be done by hand, which is not feasible. Plus, signs change and move around, making the labeling task endless.
panic 9y ago
One solution is to add redundancy. A stop sign, for example, could broadcast a low-power radio signal, and be accompanied by a retro-reflective strip with a coded pattern on the side of the road leading up to it, and emit tones at particular ultrasonic frequencies… GPS could be a part of this, but it's easy to imagine what could go wrong. Somebody mistakenly installs a stop sign without updating the database. Another person makes a mistake configuring a cache parameter and the CDN starts serving up last year's map. There's a whole class of problems eliminated by keeping the information local. Imagine if you had to drive looking only at road information served over the internet -- would you trust it?
guftagu 9y ago
What do you think will happen when it (inevitably) gets hacked?

castis 9y ago

Introducing a single point of failure (1 database, across the internet), organized by a largely complex system (the DoT, possibly) to cope with an edge case doesn't feel like a very elegant solution.

pimmen 9y ago
A more costly, less elegant solution whose problem is already shared by street signs in general (meaning we could plan for it) would be RFID tags or something that tells the computer what sign this is if it can't read the sign. You could also use this for training, so it learns to filter away poorly drawn swastikas from the sign. An attack on something like this would scale very poorly, as you would need physical access to all street signs. Issuing RFID to a street sign would be just another step along the manufacturing process of the sign, or as a step to the mounting of the sign. I can't take credit for this idea though, it's already been [explored in a paper](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-41647-7_15 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-41647-7_...).
- tyingq 9y ago
  >An attack on something like this would scale very poorly, as you would need physical access to all street signs I wouldn't underestimate the eventual legions of unemployed truck drivers. They will probably lose eventually, but I expect a spirited effort.
  - pimmen 9y ago
    They would be most successful where population and sign density is high, which would be the cities. During such an attack, public transport could move around people while the authorities would take care of the attackers. The problem for them is that where they would cause the most harm, rural areas (since they are in most dire need of supplies a few towns away and don't have any good alternatives to cars), is where such an attack would be the hardest to implement. Canada, Australia, Iceland and Alaska has many roads where vital street signs can be tens of miles apart from each other, as well any actual people who might be effected by this. Also, demographic movements is working to their disadvantage; more and more people everyday are moving to large cities.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      In the US they can focus on just the interstates. And, they are unemployed, already used to long boring trips, and have established communication networks between them. Oh, and disenfranchised friends at the various rural truck stops and motels that will also be razed by self driving tech.
  - kbos87 9y ago
    This actually doesn't seem that far fetched. Ex-drivers who are angry and have plenty of time on their hands out at night picking the RFID tags out of stop signs. Another scenario is more of a slow and steady war. I'd expect that autonomous vehicles will occasionally be alone and unoccupied, which makes them a tempting and defenseless target. You wouldn't even need to do any physical damage to disable them - just a little electrical tape over their sensors, or some chocks under their tires. Soon, the autonomous trucking cos have to employ some of the ex-truck drivers to go around re-enabling their vehicles. And of course, those ex-truck drivers are in cahoots with the disbalers. That could certainly drive down their savings on labor costs.
dogma1138 9y ago
This isn't a single point of failure by any stretch of the imagination. Waze and other navigation systems have a database of signs, road speeds and traffic enforcement cameras. I don't know about the US but there are places where signs are in a database already. This can be crowd sourced just like anything else. Google Street View already has a pretty good DB to start from.

hk__2 9y ago

> Road signs were made for humans because we don't have the ability to connect to the internet and fetch the data in less than a second, but autonomous car[s] do, so why not use it? Because you shouldn’t need to connect to the Internet and resolve GPS coordinates to know there’s a sign 50 meters away. If autonomous cars can’t "see" signs, let make them "see-able" with e.g. small radio transmitters along the road.

Rjevski 9y ago
The issue is that upgrading every sign with a transmitter is costly, would require power and ongoing maintenance (not to mention vandalism - a sign is just metal and usually pretty resistant, but any electronics will be destroyed by vandals in no time). An online database that can be cached (so you aren't in trouble if your network drops while you go through a tunnel or similar) is much cheaper to implement than upgrading physical signs.
- pimmen 9y ago
  Since the sign is just metal, it could serve as the antenna. Bury the transmitter beneath the ground, there you could also hook it up to the power grid (unless you use the sign's surface to act as a solar panel). I would like to see vandals mess with that. However, it ain't cheap and simple to implement, I agree with that. In countries like Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Canada and Australia they probably have the means to outfit their cities since they have the wealth to do it, but the rural areas would be a real challenge since they are so sparsely populated even when the money is there. In contrast to when these countries pioneered the implementation of the Internet, there's nothing like the phone network to piggy back this time.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Passive or Semi-Active RFID isn't expensive. All signs can be a victim of vandalsim. I think computer vision, a sign DB an IR water marked QR code and some RFID combined can produce a pretty robust and tamper reselient system.
- mannykannot 9y ago

unityByFreedom 9y ago

> The right solution to this is to have an official database of signs and their GPS coordinates Why does everyone think self driving cars can use GPS to identify sign locations? GPS is not accurate enough to do that, and the labeling would need to be done by hand, which is not feasible. Plus, signs change and move around, making the labeling task endless.

panic 9y ago

One solution is to add redundancy. A stop sign, for example, could broadcast a low-power radio signal, and be accompanied by a retro-reflective strip with a coded pattern on the side of the road leading up to it, and emit tones at particular ultrasonic frequencies… GPS could be a part of this, but it's easy to imagine what could go wrong. Somebody mistakenly installs a stop sign without updating the database. Another person makes a mistake configuring a cache parameter and the CDN starts serving up last year's map. There's a whole class of problems eliminated by keeping the information local. Imagine if you had to drive looking only at road information served over the internet -- would you trust it?

guftagu 9y ago

What do you think will happen when it (inevitably) gets hacked?