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Does autonomous vehicles not lend themselves to some sort of standardization? Rather than constructing something is completely able to drive on its own with an

by chvid 7y ago

Does autonomous vehicles not lend themselves to some sort of standardization? Rather than constructing something is completely able to drive on its own with an ability to learn traffic, signage, weather, roads etc. Instead create something that relies on standards and communicates with a central authority on road information, traffic, planning etc. It seems to me that one could make something that is a lot cheaper, a far easier to implement, a lot safer, more environmental by letting go of the ideal that the vehicle should be autonomous.

Klathmon 7y ago
The problem is then you are driving an "IoT car". One hack of a "central server", one lying or broken set of sensors, one crack or loss of encryption keys, and someone has control over a huge number of cars. Plus you run into issues of what happens if the central server goes down, connection issues, new or changing scenery or tons of other little issues. IMO companies working on self driving are on the right track here. That car should be able to fully self drive alongside humans without a single byte of data going in or out of the car.
- jmilloy 7y ago
  I don't entirely disagree, but do the cars have to phone home in order to share standardized information with standardized communication protocols?
- pault 7y ago
  I would add to that by saying that governments should meet half way and standardize road markings designed for CV. In that scenario the worst thing an attacker could do is paint patterns that confuse the car, but they can do that already.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- chvid 7y ago
  I was thinking it would work for the end-user a bit like cruise control. You drive you car to a highway that supports this form of driving. You press a button and you essentially let the authority of that highway drive you to your destination (or selected exit of that highway). A central authority can handle coordination, change of environment, safety much better than a single agent.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jmull 7y ago
I think the problem with that is that to be generally useful, autonomous vehicles need to operate in environments with plenty of entities that are not participating consistently in the standard: Human driven cars, pedestrians, bicyclists (about half of whom dart around unpredictably, ignoring other vehicles and traffic control signals), motorcycles (like bikes but faster), the weather, etc. So, yes, much cheaper and easier to implement, but also not very useful because they won't be able to drive very many places people want to go.
bluGill 7y ago
Cell phone coverage isn't 100%. This is both by coverage area and reliability. I've been in remote areas with no signal (when you don't see even one car over an hour of driving it is hard for cell companies to see the value). I've lost all phone service when a backhoe took out a line. I've lost LTE service for a month when lightening hit the tower. I expect my car to still work correctly in all of the above situations. Only a car that can work without communication counts. Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to being able to contact a central server. Knowing where they is heavy traffic lets the car plan a less busy route. Knowing the weather is bad can let the car know to force you to stop now rather than get stuck when the road is impassable both ways.
pjc50 7y ago
Unfortunately most of the value of an autonomous vehicle comes from it being fully autonomous - all the systems which are only mostly autonomous and may return control to a human driver at any moment are much less useful, because the human has to be there on standby. Centrally assisted cars could benefit, but what happens when the central service is down because GCP is down? Or just a local disruption to 4G/5G services? And much of the work of autonomous driving is safety within the human reaction time; doing it centrally is only going to increase latency.
lm28469 7y ago
> It seems to me that one could make something that is a lot cheaper, a far easier to implement, a lot safer, more environmental by letting go of the ideal that the vehicle should be autonomous. As long as it doesn't imply "more profit" it's not something capitalism will naturally converge to. If we were smart we'd have a single automaker offering 3 models (small city car, sedan, some kind of truck/suv) in 1 color with as few combinations of options as possible, coming out of a few gigantic fully automated factories. Same with phones, computers, &c. Each industry is basically 10 companies inventing the wheel, perpetually, forever, spending insane amount of work, time and money on the same problems and not sharing their progress.

by chvid 7y ago

Klathmon 7y ago

The problem is then you are driving an "IoT car". One hack of a "central server", one lying or broken set of sensors, one crack or loss of encryption keys, and someone has control over a huge number of cars. Plus you run into issues of what happens if the central server goes down, connection issues, new or changing scenery or tons of other little issues. IMO companies working on self driving are on the right track here. That car should be able to fully self drive alongside humans without a single byte of data going in or out of the car.

jmilloy 7y ago
I don't entirely disagree, but do the cars have to phone home in order to share standardized information with standardized communication protocols?
pault 7y ago
I would add to that by saying that governments should meet half way and standardize road markings designed for CV. In that scenario the worst thing an attacker could do is paint patterns that confuse the car, but they can do that already.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
chvid 7y ago
I was thinking it would work for the end-user a bit like cruise control. You drive you car to a highway that supports this form of driving. You press a button and you essentially let the authority of that highway drive you to your destination (or selected exit of that highway). A central authority can handle coordination, change of environment, safety much better than a single agent.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jmull 7y ago

I think the problem with that is that to be generally useful, autonomous vehicles need to operate in environments with plenty of entities that are not participating consistently in the standard: Human driven cars, pedestrians, bicyclists (about half of whom dart around unpredictably, ignoring other vehicles and traffic control signals), motorcycles (like bikes but faster), the weather, etc. So, yes, much cheaper and easier to implement, but also not very useful because they won't be able to drive very many places people want to go.

bluGill 7y ago

Cell phone coverage isn't 100%. This is both by coverage area and reliability. I've been in remote areas with no signal (when you don't see even one car over an hour of driving it is hard for cell companies to see the value). I've lost all phone service when a backhoe took out a line. I've lost LTE service for a month when lightening hit the tower. I expect my car to still work correctly in all of the above situations. Only a car that can work without communication counts. Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to being able to contact a central server. Knowing where they is heavy traffic lets the car plan a less busy route. Knowing the weather is bad can let the car know to force you to stop now rather than get stuck when the road is impassable both ways.

pjc50 7y ago

Unfortunately most of the value of an autonomous vehicle comes from it being fully autonomous - all the systems which are only mostly autonomous and may return control to a human driver at any moment are much less useful, because the human has to be there on standby. Centrally assisted cars could benefit, but what happens when the central service is down because GCP is down? Or just a local disruption to 4G/5G services? And much of the work of autonomous driving is safety within the human reaction time; doing it centrally is only going to increase latency.

lm28469 7y ago

> It seems to me that one could make something that is a lot cheaper, a far easier to implement, a lot safer, more environmental by letting go of the ideal that the vehicle should be autonomous. As long as it doesn't imply "more profit" it's not something capitalism will naturally converge to. If we were smart we'd have a single automaker offering 3 models (small city car, sedan, some kind of truck/suv) in 1 color with as few combinations of options as possible, coming out of a few gigantic fully automated factories. Same with phones, computers, &c. Each industry is basically 10 companies inventing the wheel, perpetually, forever, spending insane amount of work, time and money on the same problems and not sharing their progress.