4 ms·
Looking at how much has happened over the last two months though it seems that they are on the verge of something big. I'm on pins just waiting for stop light
by bdamm 7y ago
Looking at how much has happened over the last two months though it seems that they are on the verge of something big. I'm on pins just waiting for stop light and stop sign detection to be integrated into lane keeping. They're already seeing them, they just need to put that data into action. In terms of my personal driving that'll be pretty big, road trips get a lot shorter when my attention isn't forced.
Turns through intersections is another area where Tesla's current implementation needs a lot of help (read: can barely do it at all) but should be within range soon given where they are at. And lane splits in city streets is definitely something the Tesla implementation is going to need to get better at before really making it door-to-door.
It's a very exciting, even historic time for self driving.
But yeah, taxi fleets are a ways out. There's a turn in the road just a 1/2 mile from my house where my Model 3 gives up every time.
- xkjkls 7y agoGiven that in many countries GPS barely works enough to order an Uber with a human driver, I'm highly skeptical of self-driving taxis.
- sib 7y agoI'd like to understand this better. Intentional interference with satellites? Too mountainous or too heavy tree cover? I can imagine navigation services not working, but I've not been in places outside of the high Arctic (~82'N) where GPS itself wasn't very reliable.
- bdamm 7y agoDeep in large cities (New York, San Francisco, etc) with all the RF reflections can actually be quite challenging for GPS. Challenging == actually terrible and everyone knows it. Off by blocks, and definitely no help at all for vertical location. And inaccuracy at start-up is also surprisingly challenging; think a person requesting a car within 5 seconds of opening the app, before the location service of the device has really resolved the location, thus ending up with a pick-up pin that is a hundred feet wrong or more. And maybe on the wrong side of a street, fence, etc.
- xkjkls 7y agoThere's also issues like Australia, which because of plate tectonics the maps corresponding to GPS coordinates had to recently be moved close to a meter. We think of GPS as just the positioning part, but its just as important to remember that there is a large amount of work to translate that position into a meaningful data point within each given country. Just knowing someones exact GPS coordinates isn't helpful.
- xkjkls 7y agoHave you ever used Google Maps in a country like Costa Rica? Because the country isn't mapped to nearly the same degree (also, they have a habit of not even naming their roads), it becomes barely useful. I'm not talking about the technology of global positioning, I'm referring to all of what we take for granted with it for.