5 ms·

Toyota previews self driving car

36 points by simonbarker87 14y ago

yannickmahe 14y ago
How much time to mainstream acceptance? I'd say ten years.
- holri 14y ago
  Not in Europe. Still shifting manually. To be in control.
  - ableal 14y ago
    The European mood is shifting (no pun intended). I see an increasing number of models being offered with automatic gearboxes, even at the lower end of the price scale. Sales numbers are probably available somewhere, but, for a quick sample, I took a cursory look at a local used car site - out of 5058 cars listed from 2010 onwards, some 716 are automatic. Nearly 15% is pretty good for something that used to be much harder to come by.
- redwood 14y ago
  I think in general we're at a point now where everything is going to come increasingly faster than we expect. The singularity is near after all :)
- jfoster 14y ago
  Tricky one. I think there will be initial positivity. We're getting to that stage now. Lawmakers are happy to embrace it at the moment. The first accidents will result in a major setback, though. Difficult to say exactly how much people will freak out when the first casualties happen in a self-driving car. Hopefully by that time there will be enough data to strongly demonstrate that even though self-driving cars can still crash, they can also be much safer than non-autonomous cars.
- nazgulnarsil 14y ago
  I agree! Round number for sure!
Qworg 14y ago
From the description the BBC gave, it seems they're behind the curve: "A series of optical beacons on the roadside can detect the positions of pedestrians and obstacles, and relay information to the prototype about whether a traffic light is red or green, as part of ITS. The car can also independently monitor pedestrians' positions." What roads are going to be set up with special optical beacons so the car knows where things are? If that was possible, we would have had self-driving cars a decade ago.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
  An open problem that Google has admitted with their car automation project is a certain problem endemic to the northern part of this country: Snow and Ice. Admittedly, ice is rather difficult in any condition. However, many human drivers drive safely on snow cover with minimal problems. Accidents are higher during those times, but traffic still keeps flowing. Google-car-AI cannot handle these events at all (at this time).
  - blhack 14y ago
    If we're at a point where having to take manual control of a robot car during icey weather is a problem, then I'd say we are in a pretty good place.
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. If the only time perole's driving skills are used is during the most treacherous time to be driving, that will be scary. I already avoid driving during the first snow storm of the season because, after six months, people have inevitably forgotten that ice is slippery (seriously, it a frightening and dangerous to be on the roads during the first storm!). Now factor in the fact nobody has driven at all during the last six months and it will be exceedingly messy.
      - protomyth 14y ago
        The Twin Cities (MN) two year ago had about 400 accidents during the big blizzard at the start of the year. I hesitate to think what would have happened if those folks hadn't had to drive all summer.
TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
"The car can also communicate with other vehicles" This topic is interesting in quite a few aspects. Firstly, it's something I thought of long ago, but due to implementation details (ECM is a closed, obfuscated PITA). The biggest ideas revolving around this com device is how it processes the communication. Is the communication an authenticated protocol? Being an amateur radio operator and a fellow hacker, I can think of plenty of things to do regarding this device, both good and bad. Does it take "suggestions" from other devices? If so, do these suggestions get stored in a sort of a log to prove action your AI takes is the fault of another? And there's the security involved in the local processor. Many in this community are turned off to the idea of secure computing. In this case however, could lead to a bad user fake-signing messages to other cars. This is an open question, due to many secure implementations successfully hacked (Nintendo DS, PS2, PS3, Blu-Ray, various media stores). I'm sure there is a way to make a car-puter that interfaces with other vehicles for a mesh network. However, I would believe that this network would have to be one of those close to being mathematically provable languages. And I would not think that TOYOTA would be capable of this.
- holri 14y ago
  Car 2 Car communication is already ready: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en....
- lwat 14y ago
  You might be interested in the SARTRE platooning project currently being tested in the EU: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
The article is unclear, but it sounds like Google is not involved in this. Why isn't Google selling this technology to car companies? It seems like an excellent second revenue stream.
- cremnob 14y ago
  Why should they buy it? I think a lot of people in the tech community are under the impression that this is something Google has invented and that this will be a new cash cow. The reality is car companies have been working on this technology for a while, with many "intelligent" features already existing in higher end cars.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Google seems to be ahead of the curve in this tech. I'd love to be proven wrong, have any links?
    - cremnob 14y ago
      I've been reading about this randomly over the years so I don't have any links in mind, these are off Wikipedia. http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated-adventure-at-the-wheel-of-a-driverless-bmw http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated-a... http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/ http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/ http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/new_look__reaffirmed.html http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/n... http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997E4488B0F78F529C3B2?&id=746&allImage=1&teaser=driving-without-driver-volkswagen-presents-temporary-auto-pilot&mid=138 http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997... http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-benz-s-class-to-debut-autonomous-driving-system http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-ben... http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2012/Apr/0420_cadillac.html http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.h... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906
ceeK 14y ago
I think I'd trust Google more than a car company to make self driving cars. That right there is one of the problems though, which self driving car do you trust the most?
- ewang1 14y ago
  Issues of liability would be interesting to deal with...
- taligent 14y ago
  Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in building and shipping reliable control systems. Google can't even produce bug-free software, make high quality hardware or even ship anything at any decent scale.
  - viraptor 14y ago
    > self-parking and automatic accident avoiding Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues that you're supposed to correct manually. Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know, since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do it right... I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too. There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.
  - jan_g 14y ago
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This is an interesting article as an indicator that Toyota thinks self driving cars are that critical. Perhaps it was in response to GM's messaging along the same lines. Consider the overall effectiveness vs engineering effort compared to say 'smarter mass transit'. Imagine how useful it would be to have a mass transit system which took advantage of the extreme efficiency of rolling on rails, with vehicle based switching system [1]. We don't do that today because a) trains can't change lanes if something bad is going to happen, and b) the system is optimized for large trains going on the same route. But autonomously driving a train is a much easier problem than autonomously driving a car. And if you created a system where vehicles could self-select to enter a station then you could create mass transit with 'call on demand' vehicles which only stopped at the pickup and drop off stations. This eliminates the scheduling friction which has empty trains running at 2AM and overly full trains running at 5PM. Building a system like that is well within our current engineering capabilities, would save energy (these things are electric not gas powered) and achieve high ridership by being very nearly as convenient as a car without the hassle of driving in traffic. [1] Traditional rail switches use arms on the ground to configure a rail switch to move a car on to one track or another, in a vehicle based system the vehicle configures its wheels to take one path or the other, this allows the track to be 'passive' and not need a central switching authority.
- ewang1 14y ago
  This actually exists now [1]. All that is left is to scale it up. They could probably even make versions of the pods that'll work with existing tracks. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7148731.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7148731.stm
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Fabulous! I didn't know they had gotten the funding to go ahead with that system. I really hope it transforms the way people think about Heathrow, in so doing it will generate something one can point to without any use of the word 'imagine if there existed ...'
- georgemcbay 14y ago
jspthrowaway2 14y ago
Food for thought: the only reason traffic jams happen is because humans are imperfect creatures that can't maintain a uniform speed (barring a total-closure collision or some other abnormal event). Imagine the impact on humans if traffic jams just vanished. Engineers have known for a while that even in the heaviest congestion (think 405 or 580) it's usually only a mistake by a driver that will completely stop traffic. I wouldn't mind an auto-drive that was just speed control, enforced in situations of congestion. Rather than one person braking too hard and completely stopping a mile of 880, everybody gets programmed to travel at a fixed speed. A lot of things to work out there, but if vehicles worked together with the road to maintain their own speed, traffic would be light years better.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  This can be solved on the cheap with pace cars, as used in several European countries.
- aggie 14y ago
  It's really a matter of slow and inconsistent reaction to changes in speed, not the change in speed itself. The delayed reaction of one car causes it to decelerate more then they would have had to, then for the car behind the impact is greater and so on. Simulations suggest that as little as 20% of vehicles having computer-controlled reactions (very fast) would just about eliminate these shockwave traffic jams. Related, see #6 in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations-issue.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innov...

36 points by simonbarker87 14y ago

yannickmahe 14y ago

How much time to mainstream acceptance? I'd say ten years.

holri 14y ago
Not in Europe. Still shifting manually. To be in control.
- ableal 14y ago
  The European mood is shifting (no pun intended). I see an increasing number of models being offered with automatic gearboxes, even at the lower end of the price scale. Sales numbers are probably available somewhere, but, for a quick sample, I took a cursory look at a local used car site - out of 5058 cars listed from 2010 onwards, some 716 are automatic. Nearly 15% is pretty good for something that used to be much harder to come by.
redwood 14y ago
I think in general we're at a point now where everything is going to come increasingly faster than we expect. The singularity is near after all :)
jfoster 14y ago
Tricky one. I think there will be initial positivity. We're getting to that stage now. Lawmakers are happy to embrace it at the moment. The first accidents will result in a major setback, though. Difficult to say exactly how much people will freak out when the first casualties happen in a self-driving car. Hopefully by that time there will be enough data to strongly demonstrate that even though self-driving cars can still crash, they can also be much safer than non-autonomous cars.
nazgulnarsil 14y ago
I agree! Round number for sure!

Qworg 14y ago

From the description the BBC gave, it seems they're behind the curve: "A series of optical beacons on the roadside can detect the positions of pedestrians and obstacles, and relay information to the prototype about whether a traffic light is red or green, as part of ITS. The car can also independently monitor pedestrians' positions." What roads are going to be set up with special optical beacons so the car knows where things are? If that was possible, we would have had self-driving cars a decade ago.

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
An open problem that Google has admitted with their car automation project is a certain problem endemic to the northern part of this country: Snow and Ice. Admittedly, ice is rather difficult in any condition. However, many human drivers drive safely on snow cover with minimal problems. Accidents are higher during those times, but traffic still keeps flowing. Google-car-AI cannot handle these events at all (at this time).
- blhack 14y ago
  If we're at a point where having to take manual control of a robot car during icey weather is a problem, then I'd say we are in a pretty good place.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. If the only time perole's driving skills are used is during the most treacherous time to be driving, that will be scary. I already avoid driving during the first snow storm of the season because, after six months, people have inevitably forgotten that ice is slippery (seriously, it a frightening and dangerous to be on the roads during the first storm!). Now factor in the fact nobody has driven at all during the last six months and it will be exceedingly messy.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      The Twin Cities (MN) two year ago had about 400 accidents during the big blizzard at the start of the year. I hesitate to think what would have happened if those folks hadn't had to drive all summer.

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago

"The car can also communicate with other vehicles" This topic is interesting in quite a few aspects. Firstly, it's something I thought of long ago, but due to implementation details (ECM is a closed, obfuscated PITA). The biggest ideas revolving around this com device is how it processes the communication. Is the communication an authenticated protocol? Being an amateur radio operator and a fellow hacker, I can think of plenty of things to do regarding this device, both good and bad. Does it take "suggestions" from other devices? If so, do these suggestions get stored in a sort of a log to prove action your AI takes is the fault of another? And there's the security involved in the local processor. Many in this community are turned off to the idea of secure computing. In this case however, could lead to a bad user fake-signing messages to other cars. This is an open question, due to many secure implementations successfully hacked (Nintendo DS, PS2, PS3, Blu-Ray, various media stores). I'm sure there is a way to make a car-puter that interfaces with other vehicles for a mesh network. However, I would believe that this network would have to be one of those close to being mathematically provable languages. And I would not think that TOYOTA would be capable of this.

holri 14y ago
Car 2 Car communication is already ready: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en....
lwat 14y ago
You might be interested in the SARTRE platooning project currently being tested in the EU: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

The article is unclear, but it sounds like Google is not involved in this. Why isn't Google selling this technology to car companies? It seems like an excellent second revenue stream.

cremnob 14y ago
Why should they buy it? I think a lot of people in the tech community are under the impression that this is something Google has invented and that this will be a new cash cow. The reality is car companies have been working on this technology for a while, with many "intelligent" features already existing in higher end cars.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Google seems to be ahead of the curve in this tech. I'd love to be proven wrong, have any links?
  - cremnob 14y ago
    I've been reading about this randomly over the years so I don't have any links in mind, these are off Wikipedia. http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated-adventure-at-the-wheel-of-a-driverless-bmw http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated-a... http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/ http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/ http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/new_look__reaffirmed.html http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/n... http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997E4488B0F78F529C3B2?&id=746&allImage=1&teaser=driving-without-driver-volkswagen-presents-temporary-auto-pilot&mid=138 http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997... http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-benz-s-class-to-debut-autonomous-driving-system http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-ben... http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2012/Apr/0420_cadillac.html http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.h... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906

ceeK 14y ago

I think I'd trust Google more than a car company to make self driving cars. That right there is one of the problems though, which self driving car do you trust the most?

ewang1 14y ago
Issues of liability would be interesting to deal with...
taligent 14y ago
Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in building and shipping reliable control systems. Google can't even produce bug-free software, make high quality hardware or even ship anything at any decent scale.
- viraptor 14y ago
  > self-parking and automatic accident avoiding Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues that you're supposed to correct manually. Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know, since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do it right... I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too. There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.
- jan_g 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago

This is an interesting article as an indicator that Toyota thinks self driving cars are that critical. Perhaps it was in response to GM's messaging along the same lines. Consider the overall effectiveness vs engineering effort compared to say 'smarter mass transit'. Imagine how useful it would be to have a mass transit system which took advantage of the extreme efficiency of rolling on rails, with vehicle based switching system [1]. We don't do that today because a) trains can't change lanes if something bad is going to happen, and b) the system is optimized for large trains going on the same route. But autonomously driving a train is a much easier problem than autonomously driving a car. And if you created a system where vehicles could self-select to enter a station then you could create mass transit with 'call on demand' vehicles which only stopped at the pickup and drop off stations. This eliminates the scheduling friction which has empty trains running at 2AM and overly full trains running at 5PM. Building a system like that is well within our current engineering capabilities, would save energy (these things are electric not gas powered) and achieve high ridership by being very nearly as convenient as a car without the hassle of driving in traffic. [1] Traditional rail switches use arms on the ground to configure a rail switch to move a car on to one track or another, in a vehicle based system the vehicle configures its wheels to take one path or the other, this allows the track to be 'passive' and not need a central switching authority.

ewang1 14y ago
This actually exists now [1]. All that is left is to scale it up. They could probably even make versions of the pods that'll work with existing tracks. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7148731.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7148731.stm
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Fabulous! I didn't know they had gotten the funding to go ahead with that system. I really hope it transforms the way people think about Heathrow, in so doing it will generate something one can point to without any use of the word 'imagine if there existed ...'
georgemcbay 14y ago

jspthrowaway2 14y ago

Food for thought: the only reason traffic jams happen is because humans are imperfect creatures that can't maintain a uniform speed (barring a total-closure collision or some other abnormal event). Imagine the impact on humans if traffic jams just vanished. Engineers have known for a while that even in the heaviest congestion (think 405 or 580) it's usually only a mistake by a driver that will completely stop traffic. I wouldn't mind an auto-drive that was just speed control, enforced in situations of congestion. Rather than one person braking too hard and completely stopping a mile of 880, everybody gets programmed to travel at a fixed speed. A lot of things to work out there, but if vehicles worked together with the road to maintain their own speed, traffic would be light years better.

tadfisher 14y ago
This can be solved on the cheap with pace cars, as used in several European countries.
aggie 14y ago
It's really a matter of slow and inconsistent reaction to changes in speed, not the change in speed itself. The delayed reaction of one car causes it to decelerate more then they would have had to, then for the car behind the impact is greater and so on. Simulations suggest that as little as 20% of vehicles having computer-controlled reactions (very fast) would just about eliminate these shockwave traffic jams. Related, see #6 in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations-issue.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innov...