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People are often surprised that many planes can land completely autonomously on airports that support autoland (I think they call it ILS CAT 3). And that work o
by vegardx 8y ago
People are often surprised that many planes can land completely autonomously on airports that support autoland (I think they call it ILS CAT 3). And that work on systems like that started in the 60s.
- adrianN 8y agoAutomating systems to interact with other automatic systems, likes planes and ILS, is a lot easier than automating systems that need to interact with humans.
- alxlaz 8y agoAnd it's even harder to automate systems that have to derive data from environmental cues. A line-following robot is something simple enough that undergrad students can build, and making it stop if it detects obstacles is a good choice for extra credit. A road-following car that stops when detecting obstacles is way, way, way more complicated than that.
- adrianN 8y agoI don't think stopping for obstacles is the hard part of autonomous driving.
- reitanqild 8y agoIt gets harder when you are: * Out of the lab * On roads that aren't level * When the obstacles move * etc
- rsynnott 8y agoIt's one surprisingly hard part of it. Note how Teslas enjoy driving into stationary objects with certain properties, say.
- adrianN 8y agoIt is my understanding that this is due to having the wrong kinds of sensors.
- kwhitefoot 8y agoThere is a road (Norway, Drammen-Svelvik) that I travel once or twice a week in my 2015 Tesla S 70D that often has a car parked on a particular corner. The car is directly ahead of my car and side on; my car reliably interprets this stationary car as being on the road and that we are on a collision course and applies the brakes even though the road actually bends to the left and the stationary car is not in the way. If I didn't know the road I might well have reacted in the same way. I'm not sure that improving the sensors would necessarily change things, the software that interprets the sensor output must be improved too.
- alxlaz 8y agoIt's very complicated. Not bumping into stationary objects on the road is fairly simple with the right kind of sensors, but most obstacles you encounter in real life are neither permanently stationary nor permanently in motion, and are not always on the road.
- ianai 8y agoSo outlaw human drivers?
- adrianN 8y agoGood luck. Don't forget pedestrians and cyclists.
- ianai 8y agoDoesn’t have to be total - just in designated streets. One way streets work well enough. It wouldn’t solve the total problem, but I bet it’d solve enough to matter in the city.
- adrianN 8y agoI don't like the idea of outlawing humans from ever increasing parts of public space. Cars get too much already.
- close04 8y agoI think it would be more like "take a fraction of the space cars get today but dedicate it 100% to the machines to make it as efficient as possible". So computers driving cars on a one lane road could probably do it more efficiently than humans do today on a 3 lane one. The idea isn't to give cars more space but rather to give them less and use it so efficiently that you actually get even better results then you had before.
- nradov 8y agoYou are assuming that people will reliably follow the law. That's a bad assumption. I've seen people driving the wrong way on one-way streets multiple times. As long as there are any human drivers at all they're going to do stupid or illegal things, and any autonomous vehicles will have to cope with that reality.
- nradov 8y agoAutoland systems have come a long way, but they're still unable to recognize and cope with certain critical mechanical failures. The human pilots remain actively engaged in flying the airplane, ready to take over in case something goes wrong. In car terms it's like Level 2 autonomous driving.