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As someone who's old enough to remember road trips armed with nothing more than a Rand McNally road atlas for navigation (really not that long ago - and I do co
by jcadam 9y ago
As someone who's old enough to remember road trips armed with nothing more than a Rand McNally road atlas for navigation (really not that long ago - and I do continue to take one along nowadays as a backup), I'll never trust an autonomous vehicle that needs to be fed a constant stream of up-to-the-minute mapping data in order to make decisions.
- rimliu 9y agoI am with you here. Autonomous vehicle may need GPS for navigation, but it should be able to drive down the roads without it.
- jcadam 9y agoGPS is a nice-to-have, but wouldn't be necessary for a true AI, given an autonomous car can have more and better on-board sensors than your basic-issue human (we don't have eyes in the backs of our heads, or LIDAR).
- jasikpark 9y agoI mean rear-view and side mirrors are the eyes in the backs of our heads, though a level 5 self-driving car would be as you say.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoWhy would a True AI (tm) need a car in the first place? "Give me your clothes your boots and your motorcycle" and all that.
- nemothekid 9y agoI don't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get from A to B without some sort of navigation assistance? Unless your "true-AI" stops to ask locals for directions, its going to need some sort of GPS. Can't say I'm looking forward to arguing with my car about how it should have taken a left on Main St, instead of a right.
- white-flame 9y ago> I don't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get from A to B without some sort of navigation assistance? GPS ≠ navigation assistance. You can infer where you are on a conceptual map from reading your surroundings, especially signage. Getting a latitude/longitude estimate from the GPS network and trying to match it with an overly precise and possibly out of date map isn't the only way to infer your current position. It's only useful when you don't already know where you are, and computers are good at precisely remembering the path they took from the last known observed reference. Plus, self-driving cars need to be aware of their surroundings, and not solely rely on blindly following a hyper-precise map as a prescription of the road details ahead. Having the local observations become the canonical precision knowledge, and keeping the map as conceptual knowledge of how roads connect places, implicitly gains a lot of this sort of benefit.
- Slansitartop 9y agoDefinitely. GPS can't be relied on: there are lots of places with naturally bad reception and the military sometimes tests GPS jammers, like during the recent exercise. It's interesting to note that the first in-car navigation system used no GPS: it relied solely on inertial navigation and map-fitting to determine its location. For navigation, an autonomous car needs something like that as backup for GPS. All the actual driving needs to be done with on-board sensors, though.
- cobookman 9y agoDead reckoning is actually fairly accurate if done right. I'd be surprised if the lidar units aren't being used for a similar algorithm.
- nradov 9y agoDoing dead reckoning "right" over an extended distance requires extremely expensive laser ring gyroscopes. It's going to be a long time before those (or something with similar accuracy) will be affordable for consumer use.
- majormajor 9y agoWould a self-driving car need perfect dead reckoning? I was able to update my assumptions about my distance and location based on street signs before I had GPS...
- com2kid 9y agoCouldn't the device correct using local land marks? A minimal offline map, maybe even just topographic, that shouldn't change too often. "Expected hill was crested 5 meters sooner then expected, update estimated position accordingly".
- nradov 9y agoIf you have local land marks then you don't really need dead reckoning at all. Cheap dead reckoning sensors have so much error and drift right now as to be mostly useless for driving. The expensive sensors work but aren't economical for cheap passenger cars.
- saiya-jin 9y agoThose map-only trips were true only decade ago for most of us. And they sucked sometimes, one desperately trying to avoid big cities because it was nightmare to get through, especially in foreign countries (not so much of an issue in US, very real problem in EU). I recall one desperate drive through Budapest, chasing any living being at 2 am somewhere no clue where, those few random people not speaking english and ignoring me naming big cities in direction we wanted to go. Of course no driving directions anywhere. Imagine the same task with any offline GPS map now. These days, you don't even notice big cities unless highways are stupidly done to lead only through the center.
- djtriptych 9y agoBrains pretty much need a constant stream of up-to-the-minute data as well: eyes and ears, both of which can fail.
- cjensen 9y agoThat's not what he's saying. He's saying a stream of data from a server rather than directly from sensors.
- djtriptych 9y agoAh. Well, they don't need a stream do they? Why not periodic downloads of the map area 10 miles in every direction?