5 ms·

Cars of today already have this problem. If one sensor says there's a solid object right in front of you that just popped out, and another sensor says there pro

• AlotOfReading 4y ago
  You can't and won't get perfect sensing. It's simply not possible. A safe vehicle design avoids the situation of having to decide whether to slam on the brakes constantly by realizing that's a fundamentally unsafe mode to be operating in. You should already be slowing/able to safely brake/pulling over/stopped before that point excepting rare "everything explodes simultaneously" situations you can try to engineer away with safety ratings and MTBF numbers.
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    > A safe vehicle design avoids the situation And, since you aren't driving a fully automated vehicle, it driving below speed limits becomes much less annoying (and, if all cars can coordinate their speeds, prevent traffic jams altogether).
• rbanffy 4y ago
  If you have two sensors, you have one. You can't resolve a disagreement of two sensors. Stopping the car is the only option in this case, but, say, if you have four sensors and one says there is 100% certainty of a solid object ahead of you, one says it's 50/50 and two others say it's a 100% no, then a mild braking action may be all that's needed, to give the car and its sensors more time to react and assess. Worst case scenario you still hit the solid object at an easily survivable speed. You also signal cars behind you to actuate their brakes accordingly (and, in turn, inform traffic behind them of their actions).
  • samstave 4y ago
    And it gets way more interesting when every care itself is a cluster, or node of sensors, and all of these sensors of the same type can form telemetry fabrics of all the families of sensor-types across the nodes. Each a plane, and then ultimately being able to see the relationships of patterns of sensor groups. I wonder how that information will become useful?
    • rbanffy 4y ago
      First use could be to model traffic patterns - as undoubtedly all online mapping apps already do. As the meshes get denser, the cars can become aware of traffic patterns around them and make decisions in a coordinated way, forming "trains" to reduce drag in highways, for instance. Eventually enough data is gathered that we have predictive models for traffic jams and accidents and can act to prevent them.
      • samstave 4y ago
        exactly
      • astrange 4y ago
        This seems fanciful - "if it'd work so well, why don't we already do it" is a real point against it. I think people imagining this are forgetting problems with communications overhead, trusting each other, and how much it'd actually be useful. What we do have are realtime traffic alerts and Waze, and presumably a robot car could use those as well as we do.
  • Tade0 4y ago
    > You can't resolve a disagreement of two sensors. Two sensors are still useful when all you need to know is if there's a disagreement.
    • rbanffy 4y ago
      True, but the usual action is to hand the decision to the human, who can look out, figure out which (if any) sensor is right, and take appropriate action (737 Max feelings).
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Drivers of today also have this problem in the form of a lack of standards for vehicle height and headlight power.