4 ms·

Staying inside a lane isn't the hard problem.

arijun 7y ago
I agree completely. Putting a guide wire in the road would be spending a lot of money to (incompletely) solve a problem that’s already been solved.
bstar77 7y ago
The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be the primary vector to guide the car.
- hwillis 7y ago
  Why? There's very little information that would be better coming from the road. To drive you want to know where you are, what the road surface conditions are like, where the road goes, and what else is on the road. Road conditions can easily come from anywhere. Weather radar is at least good enough to know when roads might be wet or cold. Making roads smart enough to sense oil spills or even wetness would be incredibly hard. Knowing where the road goes is certainly far better done by cellular. Connection to each segment of road would be fraught with hard to repair problems. Traffic conditions likewise are far better done from somewhere else, and cars would be much more able to see things on the road etc. The only argument I can see as at all reasonable is that locating cars is difficult, and doing it with vision is incredibly challenging. You may not be aware how much GPS has improved. With a good view of the sky you can get (somewhat slow) accuracy to about a foot. Realistically that's just as good as you could possibly expect from a roadside device like RFID, bluetooth, or induction. The last inches may be important, but billions of dollars spent burying things in the road will not help.
- superkuh 7y ago
  This backfires badly in places with cold winter climates where the offical road markings and edges become obscured due to snow and ice for days and sometimes seasons (road edge creep) at a time. Human drivers don't follow the official lane markings because they can't be seen. They follow the paths in the snow everyone else has packed down. These paths often diverge from the road markings or any sort of absolute positioning system.
toast0 7y ago
To elaborate on this, camera based lane keeping systems are readily available and generally work well if the lane markings are in good enough condition and aren't obscured by snow. A signal embedded in the pavement wouldn't be subject to wear, but it would make adjusting lanes much more difficult (if you've driven in the bay area, you've probably noticed lane lines moved back and forth for construction pretty regularly) and it would actually be worse in the snow/ice --- a consensus lane appears which may not follow the marked alignment, and following the marked alignment would involve driving over accumulated snow and ice.

I agree completely. Putting a guide wire in the road would be spending a lot of money to (incompletely) solve a problem that’s already been solved.

bstar77 7y ago

The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be the primary vector to guide the car.

hwillis 7y ago
Why? There's very little information that would be better coming from the road. To drive you want to know where you are, what the road surface conditions are like, where the road goes, and what else is on the road. Road conditions can easily come from anywhere. Weather radar is at least good enough to know when roads might be wet or cold. Making roads smart enough to sense oil spills or even wetness would be incredibly hard. Knowing where the road goes is certainly far better done by cellular. Connection to each segment of road would be fraught with hard to repair problems. Traffic conditions likewise are far better done from somewhere else, and cars would be much more able to see things on the road etc. The only argument I can see as at all reasonable is that locating cars is difficult, and doing it with vision is incredibly challenging. You may not be aware how much GPS has improved. With a good view of the sky you can get (somewhat slow) accuracy to about a foot. Realistically that's just as good as you could possibly expect from a roadside device like RFID, bluetooth, or induction. The last inches may be important, but billions of dollars spent burying things in the road will not help.
superkuh 7y ago
This backfires badly in places with cold winter climates where the offical road markings and edges become obscured due to snow and ice for days and sometimes seasons (road edge creep) at a time. Human drivers don't follow the official lane markings because they can't be seen. They follow the paths in the snow everyone else has packed down. These paths often diverge from the road markings or any sort of absolute positioning system.

toast0 7y ago

To elaborate on this, camera based lane keeping systems are readily available and generally work well if the lane markings are in good enough condition and aren't obscured by snow. A signal embedded in the pavement wouldn't be subject to wear, but it would make adjusting lanes much more difficult (if you've driven in the bay area, you've probably noticed lane lines moved back and forth for construction pretty regularly) and it would actually be worse in the snow/ice --- a consensus lane appears which may not follow the marked alignment, and following the marked alignment would involve driving over accumulated snow and ice.