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I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention i

I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap.

adamsmith143 5y ago
>which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. Uber alone has a market cap nearly 3x that and they have explicitly said they will only become profitable as an autonomous taxi co. Tesla is worth nearly a Trillion on its own. Where do you get 25B from?
jowday 5y ago
> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.
- pm90 5y ago
  I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it. > In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity. Well, yeah nobody said it was easy. But, it does seem like something that could work, whereas we know that fully autonomous is just not possible with the tech we have today.
  - jowday 5y ago
    Define “fully autonomous” - we have driverless cars in Phoenix and San Francisco right now - granted, with some pretty narrow constraints. Not as narrow as “needs custom hardware installed along every road to work” Another thing to understand is that perception in the way you’re imagining these cameras would work isn’t really an issue for AVs right now. I don’t think the problem you’re describing is a real blocker for AVs.
  - madamelic 5y ago
    > I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it. Collabing with DoT is a terrible idea imo. Anyone who has seen anything any DoT in America has tried to do in the last few decades should immediately know why. It will cost an astronomical amount of money along with an equal time length. To put "wires in road", it would likely be a project on the scale of trillions and 50+ year deadline. It won't happen, it's more feasible to solve the problem of how to have smart cars on dumb roads rather than relying on bloated and corrupt DoT & contractors to do the work of making smart roads. This isn't even to mention the likely quagmire of what happened with early railroads where the rails laid by different companies weren't compatible with each other and you had to switch to an entirely different train to continue your journey.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  > You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If it is something other than all the big car companies refuse play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.
  - jowday 5y ago
    I mean, I described the reason. The other thing is that perception the way you’re thinking about it isn’t a huge problem for AVs. They’re generally able to recognize all of the objects and elements they need to from their onboard sensors. The problem is a lack of deeper understanding of what they’re seeing, not a lack of viewing angles or range. And more range/angles won’t fix that.
  - sonofhans 5y ago
    Let’s assume your proposal — wires in the road to aid lane-keeping — works perfectly. What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? That’s far from the hardest problem. It doesn’t account for stopped vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, deer, or any of the other things human drivers commonly encounter and avoid without fanfare. Even if we imagine some sort of car-utopia where only AV vehicles are allowed on your perfect roads it doesn’t account for common vehicle malfunctions like blown tires. You shouldn’t IMO scope the problem only to lane-keeping. That’s a very small part of the problem space. Solutions aimed at only that problem still leave the most important problems untouched.
    - jklinger410 5y ago
      > What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? Corner identifying, light changing, cross-walk identifying, speed limits, addresses. Not to mention, if the car can't mistake a hunched over person on the side of the road as a curb (because the curb identifies itself) it makes everything else easier to identify. More computation can be freed up to identify things that ARE NOT KNOWN if there is something that IS known.
- jsnodlin 5y ago
AlwaysRock 5y ago
It's a bit frustrating because if all calls were mostly autonomous we could likely have less traffic deaths within a few years. Self driving cars are already great at making snap judgements. Better than most humans. They also make a lot less stupid mistakes than humans do. The edge cases are the hard part. A human knows what to do when a random construction worker or cop is directing traffic. Self driving car? Not so much.
rcxdude 5y ago
It's not neglected, it's just it's basically step zero. Figuring out where the car is in the road is so far down the list of problems a self-driving car needs to solve that if you can't solve it without external aid there's no hope whatsoever you're going to solve the rest of it (like where everything else on the road is and what it's going to do next, unless your plan is everyone who goes out for a walk needs to wear a transponder and indicate as well). What automonous car companies want from the DOT is clearer signage and road markings, and as an added bonus, this also makes human drivers safer as well (but it's not sexy tech, so it tends not to happen).
upbeat_general 5y ago
Most issues are due to sensing humans/new human behavior, not localization. It would be difficult to make a universal system of tags/reference markers that comes close to a decent HD maps solution, even one out of date.

adamsmith143 5y ago

>which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. Uber alone has a market cap nearly 3x that and they have explicitly said they will only become profitable as an autonomous taxi co. Tesla is worth nearly a Trillion on its own. Where do you get 25B from?

jowday 5y ago

> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.

pm90 5y ago
I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it. > In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity. Well, yeah nobody said it was easy. But, it does seem like something that could work, whereas we know that fully autonomous is just not possible with the tech we have today.
- jowday 5y ago
  Define “fully autonomous” - we have driverless cars in Phoenix and San Francisco right now - granted, with some pretty narrow constraints. Not as narrow as “needs custom hardware installed along every road to work” Another thing to understand is that perception in the way you’re imagining these cameras would work isn’t really an issue for AVs right now. I don’t think the problem you’re describing is a real blocker for AVs.
- madamelic 5y ago
  > I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it. Collabing with DoT is a terrible idea imo. Anyone who has seen anything any DoT in America has tried to do in the last few decades should immediately know why. It will cost an astronomical amount of money along with an equal time length. To put "wires in road", it would likely be a project on the scale of trillions and 50+ year deadline. It won't happen, it's more feasible to solve the problem of how to have smart cars on dumb roads rather than relying on bloated and corrupt DoT & contractors to do the work of making smart roads. This isn't even to mention the likely quagmire of what happened with early railroads where the rails laid by different companies weren't compatible with each other and you had to switch to an entirely different train to continue your journey.
jklinger410 5y ago
> You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If it is something other than all the big car companies refuse play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.
- jowday 5y ago
  I mean, I described the reason. The other thing is that perception the way you’re thinking about it isn’t a huge problem for AVs. They’re generally able to recognize all of the objects and elements they need to from their onboard sensors. The problem is a lack of deeper understanding of what they’re seeing, not a lack of viewing angles or range. And more range/angles won’t fix that.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  Let’s assume your proposal — wires in the road to aid lane-keeping — works perfectly. What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? That’s far from the hardest problem. It doesn’t account for stopped vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, deer, or any of the other things human drivers commonly encounter and avoid without fanfare. Even if we imagine some sort of car-utopia where only AV vehicles are allowed on your perfect roads it doesn’t account for common vehicle malfunctions like blown tires. You shouldn’t IMO scope the problem only to lane-keeping. That’s a very small part of the problem space. Solutions aimed at only that problem still leave the most important problems untouched.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    > What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? Corner identifying, light changing, cross-walk identifying, speed limits, addresses. Not to mention, if the car can't mistake a hunched over person on the side of the road as a curb (because the curb identifies itself) it makes everything else easier to identify. More computation can be freed up to identify things that ARE NOT KNOWN if there is something that IS known.
jsnodlin 5y ago

AlwaysRock 5y ago

It's a bit frustrating because if all calls were mostly autonomous we could likely have less traffic deaths within a few years. Self driving cars are already great at making snap judgements. Better than most humans. They also make a lot less stupid mistakes than humans do. The edge cases are the hard part. A human knows what to do when a random construction worker or cop is directing traffic. Self driving car? Not so much.

rcxdude 5y ago

It's not neglected, it's just it's basically step zero. Figuring out where the car is in the road is so far down the list of problems a self-driving car needs to solve that if you can't solve it without external aid there's no hope whatsoever you're going to solve the rest of it (like where everything else on the road is and what it's going to do next, unless your plan is everyone who goes out for a walk needs to wear a transponder and indicate as well). What automonous car companies want from the DOT is clearer signage and road markings, and as an added bonus, this also makes human drivers safer as well (but it's not sexy tech, so it tends not to happen).

upbeat_general 5y ago

Most issues are due to sensing humans/new human behavior, not localization. It would be difficult to make a universal system of tags/reference markers that comes close to a decent HD maps solution, even one out of date.