3 ms·

That stretch of road you describe as difficult is actually not difficult at all for Waymo's current technology. Their navigation does not depend on vision.

riffraff 5y ago
how does it know where to be in the lane if it doesn't use lane markings? "stick to the right as far as possible" is not a reliable approach when the emergency lane may or may not be there.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  not a gotcha question, I'm actually curious: how does a human driver know where to be in the lane?
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Context. The faint wear marks that tires make on the road over years, the seam between lanes, the car in front of them, the distance away from the guardrail or ditch, or there are no marked lanes at all and you just have to share the road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, it's not uncommon for three lane roads to turn into two lanes during heavy snow, and in those case, the lanes are wherever everyone decided they were, collectively.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    I think this is a very good question! The case I was thinking of is a highway I was in last week, where temporary work has one of the directions going through the other direction, so the 2+emergency lanes in one direction become 2 lanes without emergency in one direction and one lane in the opposite one. In this case, there are temporary lane markings on the ground indicating you should not follow the old ones, but rather align yourself further to the right then you would normally do. OTOH, I am familiar with the situation in Rome where often the lane markings are deleted and a road may be 2-3-4 lanes depending on how people queue up, in which case people would generally rely on social/experience cues, which I'm unable to formalize.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system handles situations where a divided highway is under construction and has temporary lines painted to direct the right side of the road to drive on the left side while left side traffic is held up by a man in a vest holding a sign. This isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, and if the road crews are hard at work, the zone where this is occurring can move by miles a day. To navigate this, a driver needs to rely on road markings, temporary signs, and humans directing traffic. Maps won't cut the mustard in a situation like this. If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I assume that, once you get vehicles driving autonomously on sections of highways, you have some sort of beacon/alerting system that cause the vehicle to tell the driver that it's going to be dropping out of autonomous mode.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the words "full self driving" should never be used to describe it.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        On a highway, you often don't have a man in a vest and the signs I see are often vague alerts about construction and lane shifts ahead that may or may not be actually happening at the moment. But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible construction area to give a human a minute or so to take over.
      - 8note 5y ago
        I'd see self driving as not needing a person at the wheel. I don't care if there are changes to the road, it's being driven without a person nat the wheel

riffraff 5y ago

how does it know where to be in the lane if it doesn't use lane markings? "stick to the right as far as possible" is not a reliable approach when the emergency lane may or may not be there.

TchoBeer 5y ago
not a gotcha question, I'm actually curious: how does a human driver know where to be in the lane?
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Context. The faint wear marks that tires make on the road over years, the seam between lanes, the car in front of them, the distance away from the guardrail or ditch, or there are no marked lanes at all and you just have to share the road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, it's not uncommon for three lane roads to turn into two lanes during heavy snow, and in those case, the lanes are wherever everyone decided they were, collectively.
- riffraff 5y ago
  I think this is a very good question! The case I was thinking of is a highway I was in last week, where temporary work has one of the directions going through the other direction, so the 2+emergency lanes in one direction become 2 lanes without emergency in one direction and one lane in the opposite one. In this case, there are temporary lane markings on the ground indicating you should not follow the old ones, but rather align yourself further to the right then you would normally do. OTOH, I am familiar with the situation in Rome where often the lane markings are deleted and a road may be 2-3-4 lanes depending on how people queue up, in which case people would generally rely on social/experience cues, which I'm unable to formalize.
MichaelGroves 5y ago
I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system handles situations where a divided highway is under construction and has temporary lines painted to direct the right side of the road to drive on the left side while left side traffic is held up by a man in a vest holding a sign. This isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, and if the road crews are hard at work, the zone where this is occurring can move by miles a day. To navigate this, a driver needs to rely on road markings, temporary signs, and humans directing traffic. Maps won't cut the mustard in a situation like this. If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."
- ghaff 5y ago
  I assume that, once you get vehicles driving autonomously on sections of highways, you have some sort of beacon/alerting system that cause the vehicle to tell the driver that it's going to be dropping out of autonomous mode.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the words "full self driving" should never be used to describe it.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      On a highway, you often don't have a man in a vest and the signs I see are often vague alerts about construction and lane shifts ahead that may or may not be actually happening at the moment. But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible construction area to give a human a minute or so to take over.
    - 8note 5y ago
      I'd see self driving as not needing a person at the wheel. I don't care if there are changes to the road, it's being driven without a person nat the wheel