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In 1991, Congress authorized $650M to make driverless cars a reality (2013)
- diminish 8y agoWe invented horseless auto mobile but required continuous human attention for steering and managing the machine. With a horse indeed we already had semi-driverless operation in some scenarios. We are reinventing the "horse" - sometimes I think.
- evanlivingston 8y agoAnd I believe less consumption of fossil fuel
- i_am_proteus 8y agoAutomobiles consume much less fuel during long-term idle periods.
- coldtea 8y agoUnfortunately they also encourage much more use, and thus, less idle periods, long-term or otherwise.
- evanlivingston 8y agoHowever, automobiles require significantly more resources and energy to produce.
- agumonkey 8y agoWe're reinventing Nature anyway. When we'll have to go very tiny, green we'll have insects/animals. Except with a programmatic interface. Not sure which is best.
- mrfusion 8y agoMaybe all of biology is the previous civilization reinventing nature. (Deep thought)
- Fricken 8y agoIf Henry Ford had asked the people what they wanted, they would've asked for a better horse.
- coldtea 8y agoAnd what a better alternative world that would be...
- spullara 8y agoI often remark that people really did want a faster horse.
- starbeast 8y agoDeath's robot horse from Hickman's 'East of West', ideally. https://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/eastofwest03_finalpage.jpg https://latimesherocomplex.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/easto...
- ars 8y agoHow hard would it be to put an actual horse in control of a car? You get the speed of a car, and the self driving of the horse (or some other animal).
- starbeast 8y agoHere's a brief history tracking the progress of developments in that area. I'm not sure where this tech lies on the Gartner Hype Curve though. Pigeon controls missile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon Horse drives car - https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/videos/news-videos/butterscotch-horse-driving-car-kentucky https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/videos/news-videos/buttersco... Goldfish controls robot - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/robot_goldfish_tank/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/robot_goldfish_tank... edit to add one more as I realised that one of my favorite 'most worrying tech developments' fits right in... Rat neurons cultured on silicon substrate control robot - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/
- shpx 8y agoAt least cars don't produce four tons of manure per year https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urban-design-great-horse-manure-crisis-1894/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...
- rabidrat 8y agoWorse, they produce 4.75 tons of CO2. https://www.reference.com/science/much-pollution-average-car-produce-7f2a3d41ed9d2689 https://www.reference.com/science/much-pollution-average-car...
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoSurprisingly, the environmental impact of a horse is even higher. Public transportation or perhaps electric scooters are the only sustainable ones.
- ant6n 8y agowalking & cycling.
- metildaa 8y agoElectric bikes can be quite enjoyable to ride, the Bafang BBSHD can make it a breeze to go up even steep hills here in Seattle at a swift clip. The downsides come in the form of risk in transit (your in the weather, and have minimal to moderate protection from the road and others on it) and in securing your newfound transport in between use. There are very few dry, secure placea to store bikes & scooters, and fewer yet that have an outlet to charge. Shared bikes and scooters mitigate this problem somewhat, but thus far they seem to have serious maintenance issues after relatively short periods outdoors. Who wants to ride a rattly transport device thats missing screws?
- ndnxhs 8y agoIts not so much of an issue if you own the bike. How many people work at a place that has literally nowhere to place a bike inside and no free power points to use. I have always placed my bike next to my desk.
- pishpash 8y agoPretty sure horses needed continuous human attention. "Driver" wasn't the operator of a machine, just like "car[riage]" wasn't originally an automobile.
- blattimwind 8y agoHorses are pretty good at finding back to their stable on their own.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThe difference is that a cars don't react unpredictably unlike horses. Spooked horses are very dangerous things and can run off on their own. We certainly wouldn't accept horse brained cars on the road.
- trhway 8y agoa well trained knight's horse i think would be harder to spook than the most of the human drivers we have around.
- Nasrudith 8y agoTechnically true but they would be more akin to a severe case of road rage. Those warhorses were kept isolated from others to be kept 'trained' in the right animal frame of mind and essentially meant to act like violent psychopaths - 'working as intended' was to attack anyone except the rider, even when the rider was unhorsed. There is a reason why they were rare, expensive, and why they also had separate general riding horses with much gentler temperaments who could actually share stables. Romanticizing the past and thinking of it as an ideal that never really was and using it as a model is a rather dangerous pattern throughout history which has never really ended well. One of the most common pieces of equipment for horses were 'blinkers' or 'blinders' - whose function was to limit their peripheral vision.
- Farradfahren 8y agoA wild idea appears: Lets just put a horsehad in a amniotic fluid tank inside the car and give it steering capability for the car - voild we are done with it.
- bane 8y agoOne the problems with government run transportation R&D is that the responsible agencies are fundamentally not in the R&D business. DoT and subordinate agencies like the FAA are regulatory and risk management organizations (with some mandates in inspection, construction and telecommunications). They lack the expertise, structure and know-how to build effective Research and Development programs and to overcome their own institutional risk management culture. For example, the FAA has been trying to roll-out a new air traffic control system for decades and at a cost that regularly far overruns any estimates the Agency can put together. The DoD, DoE and the Intelligence Agencies have dedicated R&D arms (DARPA, IARPA, ARPA-E, etc.) with long legacies of knowing how to to research and shepherd it into operational development states and/or commercialization. Even other parts of the civilian government has things like the NSF, The closest the civilian world has for transportation is maybe NASA? But for self-driving cars, the DoT's R&D components are not well organized and seen very much as side-show "Administrations" and are generally new affairs. DOT's version of DARPA is called "RITA" and was formed only in 2005 by strapping together a handful of previous organizations inside of DoT and are focused mostly on, you guessed it, improving safety and studying statistics. It's no wonder that most of the government research that's actually made progress in this area have all come from DARPA.
- skywhopper 8y agoI think you're missing a few factors. Most critically, DARPA has some success because they have a customer (the DoD) with specific requirements and a nearly unlimited source of funding compared to any other government initiative. The Defense Department probably wastes more money each year on meandering, unfinishable snake-oil projects than has been spent on driverless car R&D by all entities in all of history. But it's true that driverless car tech is unlikely to come out of direct government funding. Instead, that money should be going to fund quality education at all levels, and to build proven technologies that would solve many of the same problems the driverless-car pipe dream would only be an inferior version of--ie high speed rail links in the middle distance where it's a better form of transport than cars (driverless or not) and planes.
- Retric 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y agoIn early 90s, BMW had a working prototype IIRC. Something quite elaborate even though the processing power was limited. Kodak moment.
- blattimwind 8y agoI believe one of the earliest non-guided (so actually autonomous) self driving cars was the Vamors by Dickmanns in the 80s. IIRC it used one or two racks stuffed with transputers to run the machine vision and control software. Later there was the Euroka project based off that. > ... achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1,000 miles (1,600 km) trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 kilometres per hour (109 mph) on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 kilometres (5.6 mi). In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 kilometres (98 mi) without any human intervention.
- sokoloff 8y agoI worked the spring and summer of 1991 at Daimler-Benz as an intern on their autonomous vehicle (VITA, a 7-ish meter bus at the time). This was the 2nd generation bus and I think the immediate predecessor to the S-class mentioned in parent comment. We’d sometimes test in Munich or Turin with the other European auto marquees, but mostly tested on an abandoned stretch of Autobahn just outside of Stuttgart. I worked on the vision system (as in [under the direction and guidance of my boss] wrote all the code to improve frame rate from 5Hz to 10Hz, double the processing resolution (to around 128x96 IIRC), and implemented Kalman filtering for preceding vehicle detection and ranging). System was built in Occam on Inmos transputers. Each was about $15K and roughly the power of a 486 but with fast, reliable message passing. We could auto drive (lane follow and distance keep only) using only vision, but not especially reliably; it would fault and give up every 3-15 minutes, depending on lighting and roadway conditions. Partially wet, drying roadways remained a big problem as I left at the end of the summer. Really cool internship. Part of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project VITA image: https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ
- jameslk 8y agoI found this article linked to a video someone posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755243 The video is also pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI
- 77pt77 8y ago> In the future, which may be 10, 50 years from now, there won't be a driver @1997 21 years are gone. > You'll be able to read the newspaper on your way to work. Yeah. About that...
- oldgradstudent 8y agoThe opening titles are even better: > Highways of the future may feature relaxed drivers, talking on the phone, faxing documents
- 77pt77 8y ago> talking on the phone Again, they were not completely wrong...
- andrewstellman 8y agoWhen I was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon in the '90s, I played bass in a band, and the guitar player was a grad student at the Robotics Institute working on the autonomous vehicle project, the reason CMU was part of the consortium in the article. NavLab 2 was an Army Humvee with a laser scanner mounted on the front, along with some cameras and a bunch of other sensors, and some powerful-at-the-time computers (Sun SPARCstations, IIRC) in back. It was a pretty impressive sight: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/navlab2.color.small.gif https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/n... It was usually parked in the Field Robotics garage, but if you went out early on a weekend morning, you might catch it driving itself slowly around Schenley Park (which is right next to CMU campus) – without anyone at the wheel, which was really unreal and sci-fi-ish at the time. I remember one story of a jogger who was surprised to suddenly run across it. The story goes that the he or she screamed and actually fainted. The truck was programmed to stop if it found itself in front of any obstacle, so when the jogger came to, there was the truck looming above. I have no idea if the story is actually true, but I like it anyway.
- arama471 8y agoFor anyone else having trouble loading the image: https://web.archive.org/web/20160920032328/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/navlab2.color.small.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20160920032328/https://www.cs.cm... That's pretty incredible - they let it run unsupervised? Or did the jogger just faint for a very short time period?
- andrewstellman 8y agoI remember it running autonomously on the little roads in Schenley Park, which were wide just enough for the vehicle but not open to traffic. Unfortunately, I never learned what happened to the jogger.
- iblaine 8y agoI heard the same story about the jogger being hit by the autonomous Humvee at CMU. I ended up going somewhere other than CMU, but the onsite interview process included a tour, and that tour mentioned this jogger being 'hit'.
- YesThatTom2 8y agoNo. No. No! This can’t be true! I like driverless cars. My libertarian friends tell me that nothing the government does is good. Theeefore this cant possibly be true. Same thing with the internet.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoDespite the sarcasm, this is a good point. Which revolutionary technologies have not been developed with public money?
- icelancer 8y agoThat the government spends a shitload of money on basically everything under the sun doesn't mean that public investment is always a good idea. The Internet was very largely developed by the private sector; despite public underpinnings of the infrastructure, the private sector would have brought it along in time as well and the result would have been largely the same.
- acdha 8y agoThe private sector was the phone company, and their vision was quite different. Without huge amounts of federal funding creating operating system support, tools, and operational practice the future might have looked at lot like CompuServ or AOL. I don’t know whether they still have it but the old displays at Epcot used to be a fascinating warped-mirror alternative history.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoI always find it hilarious that they test drive autonomous vehicles in Arizona. Never in Tokyo or Amsterdam.
- btian 8y agoWhy? If they don't work in Arizona, they won't work anywhere else. If AV doesn't work in Tokyo, they may still work in many places.
- scarejunba 8y agoI think this sort of illustrates just how hard iterative development is for most people to grasp. It's similar to how junior engineers frequently aim for the final finished product on the first iteration whereas most experienced engineers will iterate on development when in unfamiliar spaces.
- c1sc0 8y agoSecond the Amsterdam bit: bikes all around you makes for some very interesting driving & AI would need extensive extra training over there. Self-driving cars will need to be localized for traffic “culture” all around the world.
- wbl 8y agoOr they could not use them because bikes and trams are just fine.
- metildaa 8y agoNevermind that bikes and trams are significantly cheaper, and with the way the infrastructure is designed in many places (plus existing traffic), other modes of transit besides cars can be competitive or significantly faster than driving.
- superkuh 8y agoAnd never anywhere it snows.
- jokoon 8y agoI was watching First Man recently, the movie about the first moon landing. I'm wondering how much the popularity of computers changed how SpaceX was able to develop its software and properly analyze the data. I guess it made things easier, but to be honest I have no idea how hard NASA worked its computers and systems to use data in the 60.
- null000 8y ago> Needless to say, the program didn’t deliver driverless cars and automated highways to Americans. So what was the problem? The legislation didn’t really give the Department of Transportation any direction on how they should go about the research—only that they needed to demonstrate it by 1997. But perhaps the biggest problem was that the legislation never clearly defined what was meant by “fully automated highway system.” Look a lot more like the problem was that there just wasn't any follow through. Prototypes were made, tests were done, proofs of concept made, but $650M is not enough to overhaul an entire nation's infrastructure, and one shortish strip of highway isn't enough to convince people to go out and buy whole new cars.