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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

391 points by mgw 12y ago

jameshk 12y ago
The next step is highways!
- genofon 12y ago
  as a theoretical problem highway should be much easier because few types of "street agents" can access them (i.e. no bicycles, no pedestrians, no traffic lights)
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    As far as I know, they already have a pretty good handle on limited access roads. People use 'highway' to describe all manner of roads, I wonder if the gp is thinking about major 2 lane roads that have higher speeds but still lots of intersections to deal with.
- solomatov 12y ago
  Many cars already have dynamic cruise controls, which is basically auto pilot for highway driving. The one which are installed on BMW, brakes when the car in front of you brakes and decreases speed on curves.
antr 12y ago
I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.
- bertil 12y ago
  As a cyclist, I was shocked to see the cyclist change his mind like that —unless he was a tester too, that’s how you get bumped– but I really hope Google Cars learn that most cyclists actually don’t signal their turn that well. Cars don’t bother either, and the last frame show how most non-car drivers get killed: don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang. Seeing how Google taught its car to behave literally had me shout in joy an dance at my desk.
  - barrkel 12y ago
    don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang Can you rephrase this? I can't understand it.
    - bryanlarsen 12y ago
      It's my guess that he's referring to the common motorist behavior of switching lanes and accelerating when the car in front slows down or stops. The car in front of you slowed down for a reason. I've witnessed two accidents caused by such behaviour.
    - lmm 12y ago
      I assume GP's talking about when a car overtakes a cyclist and then turns in front of (or across) them without having driven forward enough to be clear. All too common and very dangerous.
    - bertil 12y ago
      At the very end of the video, you can see a common situation: a car waits at an intersection to turn right. Nothing seems to block its way. Actually, in the US, cars seem to turn right even when the light is red, for instance. Anyway: what they show is that, just behind the car, just at its right, there is a cyclist. But it is in the dead spot. That cyclist is most likely going steady because the path is clear: cars were waiting at the intersection, but what was blocking them just passed, so you can move along. My experience is that cars always forget to signal they are turning, and they never think about check the deadspot. This is how most cyclists die. It was notoriously how the first death involving a Vélib, (Paris’ free bike scheme); it actually happened meters away from where I was at the time. More importantly, this is something that most car drivers don’t care to check: they always blame the cyclist for “showing up out of nowhere” and usually do so violently. They completely neglect that the don’t have the right of way at all, nor that it would make no sense for them to pretend to have it if the vehicle was anything else than a bicycle: I’ve seen them always apologise profusely when they caught a motorbike in the same situation. I was living in a very busy street (the largest in Paris, actually) where there are dozens of such intersections, and it used to happen to me everyday. By ‘happen’, I mean that I had to bang on the car side to prevent the blow daily; there was visible damage to either the car or the bike weekly. I had to drop my bike at the last minute, letting it be crunched by the car wheel, or jump on the car front/engine to avoid being crushed almost every other month. That’s why I rapidly switched from my beloved bike to Vélib, to be able to afford such frequent accidents. I was hit badly twice, fell on the macadam both time: the first time, my front teeth cut my lip open (still have a scar, and one front tooth is still visibly broken in half); the second time, I busted my knee and couldn’t walk for a month. I have less of a limp now, but I can predict the weather quite accurately; and I can’t play tennis, basketball, ski, skate or do anything remotely fun, really. In a dense city, there is nothing you can do to prevent it, except never cross a street: cars would come out and turn at any time when the light is green to cross. You are inches away from the car (because that’s how much space city planning grants you) and a ton of steel is going full Bruce-Lee finger-length punch on you. It’s very hard to describe the feeling it gives you: imagine a car willingly crushing you to death. That’s about as reassuring at that. It’s unexpected, sudden and overwhelmingly violent. This is why cyclists insist one staying one meter away from deadly machines as much as they can. Most drivers reaction is “I didn’t touch you! Why do you care?!” -- including when the bicycle wheel was torn under the car front wheel. Taxi drivers are particularly violent in that circumstance -- and their parent company don’t care, at all, when you mention the problem, and a need for training. Out of principle, I refused to yield and stop cycling around: I felt I was right, and should be respected for it. Once you’ve experience Paris with a bicycle (and I had for a decade) walking in painfully slow, metro stinks and driving is absurd on every level. I’ve asked several Police officers to do something, from warning, surveilling the most common intersection; offer training; all those I talked to (including a Commissioner’ aid) felt clueless and said that they only thing they can do is scrape away the leftovers… I never dared to ask how much gore was in those. Official statistics purposely downplay the issue. I’ve challenged every local ‘Open data’ initiative to let me cross-reference hospital, morgue and police reports and sort death by vehicle driven and exact location — in vain. Someone in my family worked on car electronics, and I did challenge him to implement a side radar on the right side to prevent it -- his reaction was the usual, dis-heartening reaction from all drivers and car makers: it doesn’t threaten people inside the car, why should I care? I’ve called this the “I have a tank! Fuck You!” mentality. Notice how until couple of years ago, not a single security feature, or even measurement was about people outside the car? That’s how you ended up with a ton of reinforced metal with narrower and narrower windows, up to the point now where standard cars are actually stronger than the first armored tanks. I have banged on car side windows at the last minute as much as I could, but my life remained in constant danger. After seeing that the Police was powerless, I have investigated the idea that in this particular situation, my life was expressly at stake; no public authority could do something. I even asked them to sign affidavit confirming that was what they told me. Therefore, I believed I was left in a state of nature, i.e. a legal void in principled law systems, meaning should be allowed to defend myself using deadly force. I had started to learn how to use a firearm, and working on a campaign saying that cyclists were now armed, would not hesitate to shoot in that particular case. I considered some scary premiss around the idea that the blood would stop being ours, and start being those of the actual culprits. I considered the very likely scenario that would lead me in jail for manslaughter, i.e. for a decade. As someone who had taught classes at the local security jail, I knew what that meant: daily, violent anal rape; possibly forced drug addition if I wasn’t cooperative. This is something that made me have nightmares for years. Imagine having bruises from living your worst dream on a regular basis, and contemplating rape for a decade as your only way out. The friend who showed me how to shoot noticed I was more scared of the gun that beginners usually are; I was more scared after. I mentioned why, or rather, I said that I wasn’t sure I could stop a car swerving by killing the driver -- which was true; that just wasn’t the main reason holding a gun scared me. He thankfully pointed how far I had gone -- ignoring the main extent of it. I realised how this had repeatedly triggered very problematic psychiatric issues over the years. It’s strange and yet very empowering to have a paranoia directly triggered by a perfectly rational inference from regular lucid experience. This is the actual reason why I left Paris, the city I spent my life in, and whom I will always love. I have swore to not come back until taxi drivers, by far the worst offenders, are gone. That’s why I’m so supportive of Uber, other similar services, and Google Self driving cars: there offer a working solution. I can recognise the tiny license Uber cars have, and they have consistently respected road rules. I never considered owning a car myself, or even moving around in such a violent mean of transport. But those became the only ways for me to come back home without having crippling, yet rational, nightmares. That last five seconds, that “side death”, has been a haunting companion for years. This exact situation, so let me answer your question precisely: a car turns right without checking there is a bike there in the blind-spot (one that actually has the right of way, and more importantly a body about to be crushed). Detecting it, and waiting for the bike to pass first might be some engineers’ couple of month of work, but it is far more to me. I have never mentioned this to anyone. I just though the discrepancy between what that means to cyclist and your misunderstanding mattered.
- jchrisa 12y ago
  I think it will only take a few on the road to teach motorists what legal driving looks like. Hopefully it'll have a traffic calming effect in general.
  - gensym 12y ago
    Right. I rarely drive and actually try to obey the law when I do so, but where I live (Chicago), obeying the law is a recipe for angering other drivers. Things like obeying the speed limit or stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks delay other drivers, who are quick to express their anger. In a few years, maybe they'll just think I'm in a robot car!
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. Sure they're technically required but in any of the countries that I have been to where bikes are a frequent mode of transportation hand signals appear to be mostly optional.
  - antr 12y ago
    > Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. I was waiting for the snarky comment. All I'm highlighting is the system's ability to recognise such intention (many times ignored by drivers). Regardless, such indications seem not to be "necessary", the GSC detects the cars direction/intention primarily via its mounted laser, rather than "looking" for left/right light indicators.
deanclatworthy 12y ago
This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that kind of thing when learning to drive) earlier. What are the limitations of the peripheral vision of the car when checking hazards? - What if a fire hydrant bursts on the side of the road 50m in front of the car and makes the road ahead really wet? Can the cameras determine and detect quickly enough the need for different driving (and probably braking) due to a change in surface? The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.
- rwmj 12y ago
  The thing is .. what happens if a cyclist falls in front of a car with a human driver? Probably the car drives over him and the cyclist dies. The challenge is to do better than that, which is a rather low bar.
  - alextgordon 12y ago
    People won't see it like that. If a human driver makes a mistake, it's "human error". If a robot driver makes a mistake it's criminal negligence -- because robots are capable of not making mistakes. In other words, robots are held to a higher standard than humans.
    - DougWebb 12y ago
      I don't think it's quite that... If a human driver makes a mistake, the driver is liable. If the car makes a mistake, the car manufacturer is liable. This is true today; if you're driving along and you swerve into someone/something, that's your fault. But if your wheel falls off because of a manufacturing defect the car company is going to get sued. The car company faces a much higher liability risk, because they're responsible for ALL of the cars they manufacture, unlike the driver who is responsible for a single car. It'll be the same with automated driving software. All of the liability for accidents that occur in cars using the software will be concentrated with the software developer, instead of distributed amongst all of the drivers. That might be too much liability to make the business viable. The good news for us drivers: our insurance rates should drop once the cars are fully automated and manual control isn't even possible. At that point we'll just be passengers, and we shouldn't need to pay insurance.
rwmj 12y ago
This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)
- gamegoblin 12y ago
  Harder yet, Southeast Asia. Hundreds of pedestrians, tons of vehicle variety (some entirely makeshift), uncontrolled intersections, very little regard to any regulations.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > very little regard to any regulations. That's an important point, I never expected lanes count and lane direction to be interpreted as suggestions until I saw people going through a roundabout on both sides at the same time.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Your other comment in this thread got killed, probably because of the url shortener. Edit: I think comments killed for some reasons can't be recovered by editing them.
      - masklinn 12y ago
        Thanks, I replaced it with the huge ugly full URL, does it work now? edit: well, removed the link entirely, better? edit 2: welp, I can't delete it either so whatever. Thanks for the notice and help.
    - tim333 12y ago
      Yeah I was just biking in Vietnam and Cambodia and it's quite a different system with stuff all over the place. There is a kind of logic to it - you project their trajectory and yours and if there's no impact you keep going, otherwise you modify speed and direction in a minimal way to avoid impact regardless of going the wrong way on the wrong side of the road etc. It takes quite a bit of getting used to as a western driver though from a computational software point of view the above is probably a fairly simple algorithm.
lmg643 12y ago
somehow the current scuffle between uber and regular cabs seems to miss the joke. we're going to need a plan for the eventual unemployment of a lot of cab drivers, regardless of how the cab is hailed.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Even New York City seems to only have tens of thousands of cab drivers ('seems' because I just looked at wikipedia for a minute), I don't think they are that big a percentage of the population.
  - seren 12y ago
    I think the real markets are long haul trucking and small delivery van for the last miles. All in all it is probably a significant portions of job.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      There are several million truckers in the U.S., so it's somewhere around 1% (but it's probably less than 2%). I guess there are probably lots of delivery drivers, but those vehicles will still need tenders (at least until robots can do the last 100 feet of the delivery).
      - seren 12y ago
        The "issue" is probably not for the general workforce, but it will significantly reduce the number of not-so-qualified jobs. According to a quick googling "1 in 15 worker in a long truck driver according to the ATA" [1]. But this is expected that automation tend to reduce these kind of jobs first. [1] http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-there-in-the-united-states/ http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-th...
        maxerickson 12y ago
        Your link says that 1 in 15 workers is employed in the trucking industry. It says there are 3.5 million truck drivers, which is consistent enough with my 1%. I'm sure it will create lots of turmoil if truckers are put out of work. But there is already an enormous amount of turmoil in the employment market (for lots of reasons). Especially in the part of the employment market that truckers participate in.
arikrak 12y ago
It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...
- troels 12y ago
  That's funny, but probably a very real challenge. As a (human) driver, it happens that we come across ambiguous, contradictory or just plain impossible constraints and we overcome them by deliberately breaking the rules. I wonder how they would cope with that?
  - mikepurvis 12y ago
    This is part of the larger problem of roboethics—prioritizing and balancing a set of conflicting objectives and requirements. There's a neat introductory article with some video of example scenarios here: http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots-that-know-right-from-wrong/ http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots...
- VladimirGolovin 12y ago
  If I remember correctly, they already have one.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
- 12y ago
shekhar101 12y ago
I saw an interesting comment on the blog post. Is anyone keeping tab on the project knows if Google in working on some sort of communication between vehicles on road. That will make the self driving cars much more accurate. Lot of 'sudden' circumstances will be predictable by the car.
- fossuser 12y ago
  This would also be better for optimal traffic routing. I remember reading about it previously somewhere, but it gets bad PR for privacy reasons so I think it's brought up less often.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Many manufacturers are working on it, and in fact the Feds are already planning to standardize and mandate them: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-vehicle-to-vehicle-communication/5184773/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-ve... https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-crashes-deaths-injuries https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-...
- dalke 12y ago
  What fun it will be when someone figures out how to fake the signals and, for example, force other cars to slow down or stop.
  - skrause 12y ago
    You can do that now already, e.g. pretend to quickly step on a road while a car is approaching and watch the human drives hit their brakes. Yet I don't see that happening because the majority of people aren't jerks.
    - dalke 12y ago
      Doing so physically, that is, driving erratically or aggressively, or giving false signals, is both visible to other drivers and illegal. It can also be recorded on camera. Electronic signals are not visible, and fewer people have the ability to record and analyze the signal traffic. While the majority of people aren't jerks, consider existing cases of people/jerks who use traffic signal preemption devices for personal gain - see http://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html http://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html for an example and some discussion. See also http://www.statter911.com/2012/04/05/preempting-the-preempters-california-town-cracks-down-on-citizens-with-signal-changing-devices/ http://www.statter911.com/2012/04/05/preempting-the-preempte... . I believe this shows that is a non-trivial population of people/jerks that will be interested in traffic shaping for personal gain. Note how the defenses against those signal devices include state and federal laws and the addition of auditing techniques. The latter is possible because the transmitters and receivers are effectively controlled by the state. This is harder with cars.
dabeeeenster 12y ago
As a city cyclist, the Google solution looks way safer than the current status quo...
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    For trucks, ASL360. This uses 4 cameras around the vehicle and some simple software to synthesize an "eye in the sky" view. Actually, I'd like this on my car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw
  - josephlord 12y ago
    I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop. Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).
    - Zigurd 12y ago
      Autonomous braking exists for those kinds of events: When a person steps out in front of a car, for example. Yet I don't see people deliberately jumping out in front of cars just to mess with them.
      - e40 12y ago
        It's pretty clear why, because there are too few cars with automatic breaks. When 100% of the cars have them, you might see it.
pazra 12y ago
Given that the NSA will likely have a backdoor into any automated driving system, is this really a technology you'd like to see become all pervasive? "We don't like this guy's ideology - ok, let's arrange for him to have an 'accident'".
- 1stop 12y ago
  They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...
  - pazra 12y ago
    That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.
    - sean-duffy 12y ago
      If the government was willing to pull those kind of tactics to have you killed, I'm pretty sure they could do it without self-driving cars.
      - kumbasha 12y ago
        Your government maybe. What about North Korea's government?
        prawn 12y ago
        They also have many methods at their disposal - North Korea's government can throw you in a labour camp easily enough. In the US, a car accident in an environment where accidents are less common (presumably the case with robo-cars) will stand out more.
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  Minority Report comes to mind. And, I, Robot (I think). That's just a few examples of stories in which futuristic cars are conveniently control-able by the police when necessary.
0x006A 12y ago
Looking forward to see how self-driving cars can handle traffic in a city like Mumbai or Cairo.
- bertil 12y ago
  Indeed… I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.
  - 0x006A 12y ago
    In my experience driving is much more interactive and not so much rule based in those cities. You have to judge other drivers - there aggression and willingness to drive into your lane, there willingness to let you sneak in in front of them. Taking traffic from all sides into account might be something that works better for self-driving cars. Knowing when its ok to force someone else to slow down might be harder. I don't expect this to be just a question of scaling up. It will require new concepts and models. You might have to choose the country like you can now choose the language for predictive typing on your phone.
    - bertil 12y ago
      Indeed. I actually believe — or rather, sense, because that tends to be a fairly instinctive appreciation for me, after modeling things for so 15 years — that aggressivity is a fairly straightforward parameter in driving style: basically, it’s the margin you allow yourself to touch, or the acceptable risk you‘d take. Choosing “the country”, on a vehicle with more GPS captors that anyone could remember is probably not something difficult, but there are major and new ethical issues around that point, precisely: what do we let the user control? Can, should, will Google include a ‘Don’t abide to local driving laws’ mode? How explicit should it be? Modern ethics tend to surround several though exercices, most of which are centered around transportation accidents, namely one involving throwing, or letting fall, or pushing a button to release a lever… to have one obese man fall and prevent a car or a train from hurting three other people; those may or may not be relatives, have been careful in their behaviour, etc. What used to be theoretical questions, used to classify philosophers in their principles might become soon electronic options. Should your car, detecting a swerving vehicle is about to hit a child running after his ball, run that car into the nearby wall (after checking in 10 ms that it has working airbags) and stop the accident? Whose insurance pays the damages?
genofon 12y ago
I'm wondering how much self-driving cars will improve the system? far less accidents, much faster, less traffic jams, more efficient, no traffic light, different speed limits etc...
- kumbasha 12y ago
  0 day exploit kills 300 in a pileup on the freeway...
  - prawn 12y ago
    Almost 100 people a day die by motor vehicle in the US right now so while your above example would hit the media hard, unless it's a daily occurrence it's probably improving on the current situation.
logikblok 12y ago
Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will: 1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?
- skrause 12y ago
  No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.
- spuz 12y ago
  My guess is that it won't cater for either of those cases. It seems unlikely that Google would program their cars to break the speed limit just to save you a few minutes (speeding probably saves you a lot less time than you think it does). Also, I cannot see why anyone would deliberately and continuously take advantage of the automatic safety mechanisms on self-driving cars such that the problem would be common enough that it would cause a passenger any irritation.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    Ever heard of trolling?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I think we'll adjust laws to handle 2). There will be more than enough court-admissible sensor data from cars to sue offenders from here to the Mars and back.
yardie 12y ago
It's amazing how new technology is meeting old technology again. For example, the horse drawn carriage. Typically, the carriage driver doesn't steer the horse but points it in the direction they want to go. The horse and it's little horse brain negotiates the terrain and immediate obstacles. You never had to steer the horse to avoid driving over the cliff, it was smart enough to know self preservation. The modern mechanical car doesn't even have that level of avoidance systems. This left the driver to manage more strategic tasks. There were downsides obviously. Horses could freak out and run over a crowd of people.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- markyc 12y ago
  can't the car self - deactivate when checkups fail?
gbog 12y ago
In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy. (Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)
- mindslight 12y ago
  Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".
  - mc32 12y ago
    Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-was-a-massive-shaming-campa-858926923 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w... Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.
    - mindslight 12y ago
      Predictability and not jumping in front of cars is unrelated to not being in a crosswalk. Crosswalks actually worsen these aspects, as they make drivers more prone to needlessly slamming on their brakes to wave people out while also fostering a sense of pedestrian entitlement instead of respectful temporal negotiation. It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception. (I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).
danpat 12y ago
I assume that someone has done an analysis of how the sensors will interact when there are many self-driving cars on the road? Because many of the primary sensors are active (radar, lidar), will they work when they're surrounded by 50 other cars also blasting out the same signals?
- genericone 12y ago
  When 50 other cars are nearby actively communicating with each other about the road conditions that they each see, only a representative subset of those cars need to correctly identify road conditions and report them to the entire group as a road-conditions map. Cars in the group validate the observations and risk-factors reported by other cars. Then each car independently makes its driving decisions based on this shared-data based on its relative position in the group. In this way, being surrounded by hundreds of other cars is a plus, and leads to more data by which to determine safe self-driving behavior.
anjc 12y ago
Are their cameras visible spectrum ones? How will it work at night? Night vision? IR?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Night, hell tell me how it works in snow, with fully covered roads. I would love to see how they make that leap that people do when looking at situations where the road is fully obscured, but you know exactly where its at based on objects your used too (like mailboxes/trees/etc) GPS ain't that accurate.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Computers can remember more objects better, recall them faster and calculate your position against them with much more detail, as well as apply inference rules to correct for any missing/moved objects much better than humans can.
gfodor 12y ago
Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes. For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.
  - rpedela 12y ago
    Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.
    - eigenvector 12y ago
      Many (most?) car/deer/moose collisions are unavoidable even for a human driver. In particular, because a human driver focuses on monitoring the road ahead, they cannot determine instantaneously whether it is optimal to continue straight and hit the animal or to swerve into oncoming traffic or the adjacent lane. The reflex reaction is to swerve which can often cause an even worse accident. Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.
slazaro 12y ago
I still think that the best application for computer controlled cars is to have humans driving and computers handling the safety, braking when they detect danger, stuff like that. Lots of accidents like hitting pedestrians, cyclists or other cars could be avoided, and it's not as high level and difficult as what they're currently trying to figure out.
venti 12y ago
Autonomous car in the Berlin city center (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4
ignostic 12y ago
Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required. Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car. Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap. Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.
- scarmig 12y ago
  I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted. We absolutely have to tread carefully here.
  - andrewfong 12y ago
sixQuarks 12y ago
What happens when some asshole with some knowledge of the algorithm decides to troll commuters? For example, standing around an intersection, pretending to move forward/backward, forcing cars to just stop there.
- Already__Taken 12y ago
  We'll all be a little bit later somewhere and nobody has to die in traffic collisions.
- eric_cc 12y ago
  I would assume the same thing that would happen to some asshole standing at a busy intersection today holding up traffic by standing in the road.
- robrenaud 12y ago
  Standing in the middle of the intersection is going to be an effective way to stop cars even if they have human drivers.
- prawn 12y ago
  The cars will gradually edge forward until the pedestrian is no longer an issue. That trolling option is available to pedestrians now and I don't encounter it day to day.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Someone will get angry enough to call the police to deal with that asshole. Also, every car will be a source of court-admissible proof that the person in question was in fact disturbing the traffic purposefully.
scrabble 12y ago
I'm wondering how a robot car is going to park in a driveway -- or in a parking lot.
- elchief 12y ago
  Probably better than everyone here.
- prawn 12y ago
  Very easily. Not to mention that storage will be simpler as cars will be able to park closely together without requiring doors to open before moving to where you can enter them, or in elevated storage. At some point in the future, most people will be unlikely to own a car (just use one on demand) so their driveway will go mostly unused and their garage will be used for something else also.
  - scrabble 12y ago
    The issue comes up somewhere like a townhouse complex. Maps does not contain detailed data on assigned parking spaces and the like for these areas. This is not an issue if everyone is using self-driving cars. But when only some people are, I don't see how you'd avoid the need for cars to take over in these instances. Same with street driving really, you already have self-parking cars, but the car would need to be able to not only determine where the parking spaces are (and deal with issues like faded parking lines) but also determine whether or not there are any laws restricting the use of that space -- not only handicapped spaces, but also time of day and week. Again, not an issue when everyone is in self-driving cars because most of these rules seem designed to optimize traffic flow, but until that point (and maybe for a time after) these laws will remain in affect.
    - prawn 12y ago
      I imagine that eventually cars will park themselves in dedicated areas or move on to another job and most of us won't leave a car in a particular place and expect it to be there when we return. Most apartment owners would probably elect to use their parking space for a storage capsule and then subscribe to a robo-car service. The car would be waiting when they got downstairs and leave to go elsewhere when it returned them home. Eventually, street parking will disappear. If I still want to be driven to work, the car will drop me at the front door and then head elsewhere. In the evening, a different car will likely arrive for pick-up. Any cars not on a job or driving to a job would head to a depot for charging, service or storage.
josephschmoe 12y ago
Between truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers, that's 3 million people who should look for another line of work when this starts to happen.
etep 12y ago
Inspirational.
robotresearcher 12y ago
There are lots of subtleties in in-town driving. For example, the Google car will crawl its nose forward just a bit to indicate when it thinks its turn has come at 3 and 4-way stops. This is a strong signal to the other drivers that the car is about to make the turn, and reduces the frequency of contentions inside the intersection. It's a nice touch to have the robot replicate behaviour that most people are not even aware they are using.
cseelus 12y ago
Apparently Mercedes Benz has come quite far regarding autonomous driving. In September 2013 they let one of their S-Class models drive the historic route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany with some journalist(s) on board[1]. On this route the worlds first long-distance (194km/121mi) ride in a motorized car was undertaken in 1888 by Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz, who developed, what is known today as the worlds first modern automobile.[2] This route contains interurban as well as urban parts. The prototype car nicknamed "Bertha" is not easily recognizable from a standard S-Class model, which already contains most of the systems necessary to enable autonomous driving. [1] Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fauto%2Faktuell%2Fautonomes-fahren-unterwegs-mit-einer-s-klasse-auf-autopilot-a-920803.html http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route
- frik 12y ago
  I see no Lidar. What are the sensors? "With sensors Bertha analyzed their environment [...] detailed and peppered with additional information navigation map" I suspect a front-radar, camera and a detailed navigation map with GPS points especially for this route.
_zen 12y ago
I think the coolest thing about self-driving cars is they can create a mesh network with one another. If I'm driving to work and a traffic accident occurs 2 miles ahead on my route, with multiple self-driving cars present at the accident, those cars can share traffic information with all self-driving cars in the area. My car will then plan an alternative route around the accident before I've even seen it. Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.
- astrange 12y ago
  > Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering. There's little purpose in encrypting a signal like this. You're still proposing to trust random cars you've never met before, so how would you know which messages are fake and which aren't?
hrktb 12y ago
> Jaywalking pedestrians. There was a episode on this on the 99% invisible podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-... The above page has photos and a full transcript of the episode, I very highly recommand it. This piece reminded me of the 'problem' of jaywalking because the complexity the self driving Googe car boast to be able to handle, could also be instead reduced or anhilated by adequate urban policies. There are movements to get the car out of urban areas [1] or at least make the pedestrian the 'owner' of the street, and I think self driving cars should be positionned more as an auto-pilot for long distances, rather than attempt to make sense of the current chaos in high density areas. [1] http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg ("you are the traffic", a Roumanian poster seen in /r/bycicling)
midas007 12y ago
The interesting problems are: - tracking thousands of objects' trajectories to avoid as many threat-weighted collisions as possible. (think NYC times square) - not going too fast when visibility is blocked FYI: When I was at Trimble Nav, there were self-driving farm equipment demonstrated c. 2000.
monksy 12y ago
I wonder how that deals with potholes or roads that lack the proper markings or one way streets. Chicago has both of those.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Probably the same way humans do, only better. Computers do have memory, as well as access to external information.
intended 12y ago
Reading a lot of comments here, the theme seems to be that the benefits will trickle down to the average consumer. I can see immediate cases where it's just going to go to those with sufficient economic muscle. Less need for a garage means smaller houses, and more of them (for example). Improved insurance? Probably the same insurance premiums (inflation adjusted), with a higher premium for more human miles driven. If there is money on the table, it will get taken by those with the wherewithal to grab it.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  Which is why all the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution went to the feudal lords in their castles? As a trivial counterexample, since automated taxis will be considerably cheaper than human-driven ones, they'll become an affordable commodity usable for day-to-day travel, instead of a rare luxury used only when absolutely necessary (or somebody else foots the bill).
frik 12y ago
We need a DIY Lidar or a cheap Lidar. Any ideas or existing projects? (the 3D scanning device on top of the Google car, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar ) The Lidar that Google uses costs 80k dollars, more than most cars.

391 points by mgw 12y ago

jameshk 12y ago

The next step is highways!

genofon 12y ago
as a theoretical problem highway should be much easier because few types of "street agents" can access them (i.e. no bicycles, no pedestrians, no traffic lights)
- maxerickson 12y ago
  As far as I know, they already have a pretty good handle on limited access roads. People use 'highway' to describe all manner of roads, I wonder if the gp is thinking about major 2 lane roads that have higher speeds but still lots of intersections to deal with.
solomatov 12y ago
Many cars already have dynamic cruise controls, which is basically auto pilot for highway driving. The one which are installed on BMW, brakes when the car in front of you brakes and decreases speed on curves.

antr 12y ago

I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.

bertil 12y ago
As a cyclist, I was shocked to see the cyclist change his mind like that —unless he was a tester too, that’s how you get bumped– but I really hope Google Cars learn that most cyclists actually don’t signal their turn that well. Cars don’t bother either, and the last frame show how most non-car drivers get killed: don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang. Seeing how Google taught its car to behave literally had me shout in joy an dance at my desk.
- barrkel 12y ago
  don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang Can you rephrase this? I can't understand it.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    It's my guess that he's referring to the common motorist behavior of switching lanes and accelerating when the car in front slows down or stops. The car in front of you slowed down for a reason. I've witnessed two accidents caused by such behaviour.
  - lmm 12y ago
    I assume GP's talking about when a car overtakes a cyclist and then turns in front of (or across) them without having driven forward enough to be clear. All too common and very dangerous.
  - bertil 12y ago
    At the very end of the video, you can see a common situation: a car waits at an intersection to turn right. Nothing seems to block its way. Actually, in the US, cars seem to turn right even when the light is red, for instance. Anyway: what they show is that, just behind the car, just at its right, there is a cyclist. But it is in the dead spot. That cyclist is most likely going steady because the path is clear: cars were waiting at the intersection, but what was blocking them just passed, so you can move along. My experience is that cars always forget to signal they are turning, and they never think about check the deadspot. This is how most cyclists die. It was notoriously how the first death involving a Vélib, (Paris’ free bike scheme); it actually happened meters away from where I was at the time. More importantly, this is something that most car drivers don’t care to check: they always blame the cyclist for “showing up out of nowhere” and usually do so violently. They completely neglect that the don’t have the right of way at all, nor that it would make no sense for them to pretend to have it if the vehicle was anything else than a bicycle: I’ve seen them always apologise profusely when they caught a motorbike in the same situation. I was living in a very busy street (the largest in Paris, actually) where there are dozens of such intersections, and it used to happen to me everyday. By ‘happen’, I mean that I had to bang on the car side to prevent the blow daily; there was visible damage to either the car or the bike weekly. I had to drop my bike at the last minute, letting it be crunched by the car wheel, or jump on the car front/engine to avoid being crushed almost every other month. That’s why I rapidly switched from my beloved bike to Vélib, to be able to afford such frequent accidents. I was hit badly twice, fell on the macadam both time: the first time, my front teeth cut my lip open (still have a scar, and one front tooth is still visibly broken in half); the second time, I busted my knee and couldn’t walk for a month. I have less of a limp now, but I can predict the weather quite accurately; and I can’t play tennis, basketball, ski, skate or do anything remotely fun, really. In a dense city, there is nothing you can do to prevent it, except never cross a street: cars would come out and turn at any time when the light is green to cross. You are inches away from the car (because that’s how much space city planning grants you) and a ton of steel is going full Bruce-Lee finger-length punch on you. It’s very hard to describe the feeling it gives you: imagine a car willingly crushing you to death. That’s about as reassuring at that. It’s unexpected, sudden and overwhelmingly violent. This is why cyclists insist one staying one meter away from deadly machines as much as they can. Most drivers reaction is “I didn’t touch you! Why do you care?!” -- including when the bicycle wheel was torn under the car front wheel. Taxi drivers are particularly violent in that circumstance -- and their parent company don’t care, at all, when you mention the problem, and a need for training. Out of principle, I refused to yield and stop cycling around: I felt I was right, and should be respected for it. Once you’ve experience Paris with a bicycle (and I had for a decade) walking in painfully slow, metro stinks and driving is absurd on every level. I’ve asked several Police officers to do something, from warning, surveilling the most common intersection; offer training; all those I talked to (including a Commissioner’ aid) felt clueless and said that they only thing they can do is scrape away the leftovers… I never dared to ask how much gore was in those. Official statistics purposely downplay the issue. I’ve challenged every local ‘Open data’ initiative to let me cross-reference hospital, morgue and police reports and sort death by vehicle driven and exact location — in vain. Someone in my family worked on car electronics, and I did challenge him to implement a side radar on the right side to prevent it -- his reaction was the usual, dis-heartening reaction from all drivers and car makers: it doesn’t threaten people inside the car, why should I care? I’ve called this the “I have a tank! Fuck You!” mentality. Notice how until couple of years ago, not a single security feature, or even measurement was about people outside the car? That’s how you ended up with a ton of reinforced metal with narrower and narrower windows, up to the point now where standard cars are actually stronger than the first armored tanks. I have banged on car side windows at the last minute as much as I could, but my life remained in constant danger. After seeing that the Police was powerless, I have investigated the idea that in this particular situation, my life was expressly at stake; no public authority could do something. I even asked them to sign affidavit confirming that was what they told me. Therefore, I believed I was left in a state of nature, i.e. a legal void in principled law systems, meaning should be allowed to defend myself using deadly force. I had started to learn how to use a firearm, and working on a campaign saying that cyclists were now armed, would not hesitate to shoot in that particular case. I considered some scary premiss around the idea that the blood would stop being ours, and start being those of the actual culprits. I considered the very likely scenario that would lead me in jail for manslaughter, i.e. for a decade. As someone who had taught classes at the local security jail, I knew what that meant: daily, violent anal rape; possibly forced drug addition if I wasn’t cooperative. This is something that made me have nightmares for years. Imagine having bruises from living your worst dream on a regular basis, and contemplating rape for a decade as your only way out. The friend who showed me how to shoot noticed I was more scared of the gun that beginners usually are; I was more scared after. I mentioned why, or rather, I said that I wasn’t sure I could stop a car swerving by killing the driver -- which was true; that just wasn’t the main reason holding a gun scared me. He thankfully pointed how far I had gone -- ignoring the main extent of it. I realised how this had repeatedly triggered very problematic psychiatric issues over the years. It’s strange and yet very empowering to have a paranoia directly triggered by a perfectly rational inference from regular lucid experience. This is the actual reason why I left Paris, the city I spent my life in, and whom I will always love. I have swore to not come back until taxi drivers, by far the worst offenders, are gone. That’s why I’m so supportive of Uber, other similar services, and Google Self driving cars: there offer a working solution. I can recognise the tiny license Uber cars have, and they have consistently respected road rules. I never considered owning a car myself, or even moving around in such a violent mean of transport. But those became the only ways for me to come back home without having crippling, yet rational, nightmares. That last five seconds, that “side death”, has been a haunting companion for years. This exact situation, so let me answer your question precisely: a car turns right without checking there is a bike there in the blind-spot (one that actually has the right of way, and more importantly a body about to be crushed). Detecting it, and waiting for the bike to pass first might be some engineers’ couple of month of work, but it is far more to me. I have never mentioned this to anyone. I just though the discrepancy between what that means to cyclist and your misunderstanding mattered.
jchrisa 12y ago
I think it will only take a few on the road to teach motorists what legal driving looks like. Hopefully it'll have a traffic calming effect in general.
- gensym 12y ago
  Right. I rarely drive and actually try to obey the law when I do so, but where I live (Chicago), obeying the law is a recipe for angering other drivers. Things like obeying the speed limit or stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks delay other drivers, who are quick to express their anger. In a few years, maybe they'll just think I'm in a robot car!
jacquesm 12y ago
Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. Sure they're technically required but in any of the countries that I have been to where bikes are a frequent mode of transportation hand signals appear to be mostly optional.
- antr 12y ago
  > Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. I was waiting for the snarky comment. All I'm highlighting is the system's ability to recognise such intention (many times ignored by drivers). Regardless, such indications seem not to be "necessary", the GSC detects the cars direction/intention primarily via its mounted laser, rather than "looking" for left/right light indicators.

deanclatworthy 12y ago

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that kind of thing when learning to drive) earlier. What are the limitations of the peripheral vision of the car when checking hazards? - What if a fire hydrant bursts on the side of the road 50m in front of the car and makes the road ahead really wet? Can the cameras determine and detect quickly enough the need for different driving (and probably braking) due to a change in surface? The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.

rwmj 12y ago
The thing is .. what happens if a cyclist falls in front of a car with a human driver? Probably the car drives over him and the cyclist dies. The challenge is to do better than that, which is a rather low bar.
- alextgordon 12y ago
  People won't see it like that. If a human driver makes a mistake, it's "human error". If a robot driver makes a mistake it's criminal negligence -- because robots are capable of not making mistakes. In other words, robots are held to a higher standard than humans.
  - DougWebb 12y ago
    I don't think it's quite that... If a human driver makes a mistake, the driver is liable. If the car makes a mistake, the car manufacturer is liable. This is true today; if you're driving along and you swerve into someone/something, that's your fault. But if your wheel falls off because of a manufacturing defect the car company is going to get sued. The car company faces a much higher liability risk, because they're responsible for ALL of the cars they manufacture, unlike the driver who is responsible for a single car. It'll be the same with automated driving software. All of the liability for accidents that occur in cars using the software will be concentrated with the software developer, instead of distributed amongst all of the drivers. That might be too much liability to make the business viable. The good news for us drivers: our insurance rates should drop once the cars are fully automated and manual control isn't even possible. At that point we'll just be passengers, and we shouldn't need to pay insurance.

rwmj 12y ago

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

gamegoblin 12y ago
Harder yet, Southeast Asia. Hundreds of pedestrians, tons of vehicle variety (some entirely makeshift), uncontrolled intersections, very little regard to any regulations.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > very little regard to any regulations. That's an important point, I never expected lanes count and lane direction to be interpreted as suggestions until I saw people going through a roundabout on both sides at the same time.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Your other comment in this thread got killed, probably because of the url shortener. Edit: I think comments killed for some reasons can't be recovered by editing them.
    - masklinn 12y ago
      Thanks, I replaced it with the huge ugly full URL, does it work now? edit: well, removed the link entirely, better? edit 2: welp, I can't delete it either so whatever. Thanks for the notice and help.
  - tim333 12y ago
    Yeah I was just biking in Vietnam and Cambodia and it's quite a different system with stuff all over the place. There is a kind of logic to it - you project their trajectory and yours and if there's no impact you keep going, otherwise you modify speed and direction in a minimal way to avoid impact regardless of going the wrong way on the wrong side of the road etc. It takes quite a bit of getting used to as a western driver though from a computational software point of view the above is probably a fairly simple algorithm.

lmg643 12y ago

somehow the current scuffle between uber and regular cabs seems to miss the joke. we're going to need a plan for the eventual unemployment of a lot of cab drivers, regardless of how the cab is hailed.

maxerickson 12y ago
Even New York City seems to only have tens of thousands of cab drivers ('seems' because I just looked at wikipedia for a minute), I don't think they are that big a percentage of the population.
- seren 12y ago
  I think the real markets are long haul trucking and small delivery van for the last miles. All in all it is probably a significant portions of job.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    There are several million truckers in the U.S., so it's somewhere around 1% (but it's probably less than 2%). I guess there are probably lots of delivery drivers, but those vehicles will still need tenders (at least until robots can do the last 100 feet of the delivery).
    - seren 12y ago
      The "issue" is probably not for the general workforce, but it will significantly reduce the number of not-so-qualified jobs. According to a quick googling "1 in 15 worker in a long truck driver according to the ATA" [1]. But this is expected that automation tend to reduce these kind of jobs first. [1] http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-there-in-the-united-states/ http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-th...
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        Your link says that 1 in 15 workers is employed in the trucking industry. It says there are 3.5 million truck drivers, which is consistent enough with my 1%. I'm sure it will create lots of turmoil if truckers are put out of work. But there is already an enormous amount of turmoil in the employment market (for lots of reasons). Especially in the part of the employment market that truckers participate in.

arikrak 12y ago

It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...

troels 12y ago
That's funny, but probably a very real challenge. As a (human) driver, it happens that we come across ambiguous, contradictory or just plain impossible constraints and we overcome them by deliberately breaking the rules. I wonder how they would cope with that?
- mikepurvis 12y ago
  This is part of the larger problem of roboethics—prioritizing and balancing a set of conflicting objectives and requirements. There's a neat introductory article with some video of example scenarios here: http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots-that-know-right-from-wrong/ http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots...
VladimirGolovin 12y ago
If I remember correctly, they already have one.
bitJericho 12y ago
There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.
- icebraining 12y ago
  A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
12y ago

shekhar101 12y ago

I saw an interesting comment on the blog post. Is anyone keeping tab on the project knows if Google in working on some sort of communication between vehicles on road. That will make the self driving cars much more accurate. Lot of 'sudden' circumstances will be predictable by the car.

fossuser 12y ago
This would also be better for optimal traffic routing. I remember reading about it previously somewhere, but it gets bad PR for privacy reasons so I think it's brought up less often.
icebraining 12y ago
Many manufacturers are working on it, and in fact the Feds are already planning to standardize and mandate them: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-vehicle-to-vehicle-communication/5184773/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-ve... https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-crashes-deaths-injuries https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-...
dalke 12y ago
What fun it will be when someone figures out how to fake the signals and, for example, force other cars to slow down or stop.
- skrause 12y ago
  You can do that now already, e.g. pretend to quickly step on a road while a car is approaching and watch the human drives hit their brakes. Yet I don't see that happening because the majority of people aren't jerks.
  - dalke 12y ago
    Doing so physically, that is, driving erratically or aggressively, or giving false signals, is both visible to other drivers and illegal. It can also be recorded on camera. Electronic signals are not visible, and fewer people have the ability to record and analyze the signal traffic. While the majority of people aren't jerks, consider existing cases of people/jerks who use traffic signal preemption devices for personal gain - see http://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html http://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html for an example and some discussion. See also http://www.statter911.com/2012/04/05/preempting-the-preempters-california-town-cracks-down-on-citizens-with-signal-changing-devices/ http://www.statter911.com/2012/04/05/preempting-the-preempte... . I believe this shows that is a non-trivial population of people/jerks that will be interested in traffic shaping for personal gain. Note how the defenses against those signal devices include state and federal laws and the addition of auditing techniques. The latter is possible because the transmitters and receivers are effectively controlled by the state. This is harder with cars.

dabeeeenster 12y ago

As a city cyclist, the Google solution looks way safer than the current status quo...

Zigurd 12y ago
Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.
- rwmj 12y ago
  For trucks, ASL360. This uses 4 cameras around the vehicle and some simple software to synthesize an "eye in the sky" view. Actually, I'd like this on my car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw
- josephlord 12y ago
  I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop. Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    Autonomous braking exists for those kinds of events: When a person steps out in front of a car, for example. Yet I don't see people deliberately jumping out in front of cars just to mess with them.
    - e40 12y ago
      It's pretty clear why, because there are too few cars with automatic breaks. When 100% of the cars have them, you might see it.

pazra 12y ago

Given that the NSA will likely have a backdoor into any automated driving system, is this really a technology you'd like to see become all pervasive? "We don't like this guy's ideology - ok, let's arrange for him to have an 'accident'".

1stop 12y ago
They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...
- pazra 12y ago
  That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.
  - sean-duffy 12y ago
    If the government was willing to pull those kind of tactics to have you killed, I'm pretty sure they could do it without self-driving cars.
    - kumbasha 12y ago
      Your government maybe. What about North Korea's government?
      - prawn 12y ago
        They also have many methods at their disposal - North Korea's government can throw you in a labour camp easily enough. In the US, a car accident in an environment where accidents are less common (presumably the case with robo-cars) will stand out more.
BrandonMarc 12y ago
Minority Report comes to mind. And, I, Robot (I think). That's just a few examples of stories in which futuristic cars are conveniently control-able by the police when necessary.

0x006A 12y ago

Looking forward to see how self-driving cars can handle traffic in a city like Mumbai or Cairo.

bertil 12y ago
Indeed… I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.
- 0x006A 12y ago
  In my experience driving is much more interactive and not so much rule based in those cities. You have to judge other drivers - there aggression and willingness to drive into your lane, there willingness to let you sneak in in front of them. Taking traffic from all sides into account might be something that works better for self-driving cars. Knowing when its ok to force someone else to slow down might be harder. I don't expect this to be just a question of scaling up. It will require new concepts and models. You might have to choose the country like you can now choose the language for predictive typing on your phone.
  - bertil 12y ago
    Indeed. I actually believe — or rather, sense, because that tends to be a fairly instinctive appreciation for me, after modeling things for so 15 years — that aggressivity is a fairly straightforward parameter in driving style: basically, it’s the margin you allow yourself to touch, or the acceptable risk you‘d take. Choosing “the country”, on a vehicle with more GPS captors that anyone could remember is probably not something difficult, but there are major and new ethical issues around that point, precisely: what do we let the user control? Can, should, will Google include a ‘Don’t abide to local driving laws’ mode? How explicit should it be? Modern ethics tend to surround several though exercices, most of which are centered around transportation accidents, namely one involving throwing, or letting fall, or pushing a button to release a lever… to have one obese man fall and prevent a car or a train from hurting three other people; those may or may not be relatives, have been careful in their behaviour, etc. What used to be theoretical questions, used to classify philosophers in their principles might become soon electronic options. Should your car, detecting a swerving vehicle is about to hit a child running after his ball, run that car into the nearby wall (after checking in 10 ms that it has working airbags) and stop the accident? Whose insurance pays the damages?

genofon 12y ago

I'm wondering how much self-driving cars will improve the system? far less accidents, much faster, less traffic jams, more efficient, no traffic light, different speed limits etc...

kumbasha 12y ago
0 day exploit kills 300 in a pileup on the freeway...
- prawn 12y ago
  Almost 100 people a day die by motor vehicle in the US right now so while your above example would hit the media hard, unless it's a daily occurrence it's probably improving on the current situation.

logikblok 12y ago

Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will: 1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?

skrause 12y ago
No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.
spuz 12y ago
My guess is that it won't cater for either of those cases. It seems unlikely that Google would program their cars to break the speed limit just to save you a few minutes (speeding probably saves you a lot less time than you think it does). Also, I cannot see why anyone would deliberately and continuously take advantage of the automatic safety mechanisms on self-driving cars such that the problem would be common enough that it would cause a passenger any irritation.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  Ever heard of trolling?
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I think we'll adjust laws to handle 2). There will be more than enough court-admissible sensor data from cars to sue offenders from here to the Mars and back.

yardie 12y ago

It's amazing how new technology is meeting old technology again. For example, the horse drawn carriage. Typically, the carriage driver doesn't steer the horse but points it in the direction they want to go. The horse and it's little horse brain negotiates the terrain and immediate obstacles. You never had to steer the horse to avoid driving over the cliff, it was smart enough to know self preservation. The modern mechanical car doesn't even have that level of avoidance systems. This left the driver to manage more strategic tasks. There were downsides obviously. Horses could freak out and run over a crowd of people.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

markyc 12y ago
can't the car self - deactivate when checkups fail?

gbog 12y ago

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy. (Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)

mindslight 12y ago
Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".
- mc32 12y ago
  Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-was-a-massive-shaming-campa-858926923 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w... Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.
  - mindslight 12y ago
    Predictability and not jumping in front of cars is unrelated to not being in a crosswalk. Crosswalks actually worsen these aspects, as they make drivers more prone to needlessly slamming on their brakes to wave people out while also fostering a sense of pedestrian entitlement instead of respectful temporal negotiation. It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception. (I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).

danpat 12y ago

I assume that someone has done an analysis of how the sensors will interact when there are many self-driving cars on the road? Because many of the primary sensors are active (radar, lidar), will they work when they're surrounded by 50 other cars also blasting out the same signals?

genericone 12y ago
When 50 other cars are nearby actively communicating with each other about the road conditions that they each see, only a representative subset of those cars need to correctly identify road conditions and report them to the entire group as a road-conditions map. Cars in the group validate the observations and risk-factors reported by other cars. Then each car independently makes its driving decisions based on this shared-data based on its relative position in the group. In this way, being surrounded by hundreds of other cars is a plus, and leads to more data by which to determine safe self-driving behavior.

anjc 12y ago

Are their cameras visible spectrum ones? How will it work at night? Night vision? IR?

Shivetya 12y ago
Night, hell tell me how it works in snow, with fully covered roads. I would love to see how they make that leap that people do when looking at situations where the road is fully obscured, but you know exactly where its at based on objects your used too (like mailboxes/trees/etc) GPS ain't that accurate.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Computers can remember more objects better, recall them faster and calculate your position against them with much more detail, as well as apply inference rules to correct for any missing/moved objects much better than humans can.

gfodor 12y ago

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes. For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?

TeMPOraL 12y ago
My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.
- rpedela 12y ago
  Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.
  - eigenvector 12y ago
    Many (most?) car/deer/moose collisions are unavoidable even for a human driver. In particular, because a human driver focuses on monitoring the road ahead, they cannot determine instantaneously whether it is optimal to continue straight and hit the animal or to swerve into oncoming traffic or the adjacent lane. The reflex reaction is to swerve which can often cause an even worse accident. Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.

slazaro 12y ago

I still think that the best application for computer controlled cars is to have humans driving and computers handling the safety, braking when they detect danger, stuff like that. Lots of accidents like hitting pedestrians, cyclists or other cars could be avoided, and it's not as high level and difficult as what they're currently trying to figure out.

venti 12y ago

Autonomous car in the Berlin city center (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4

ignostic 12y ago

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required. Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car. Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap. Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.

scarmig 12y ago
I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted. We absolutely have to tread carefully here.
- andrewfong 12y ago

sixQuarks 12y ago

What happens when some asshole with some knowledge of the algorithm decides to troll commuters? For example, standing around an intersection, pretending to move forward/backward, forcing cars to just stop there.

Already__Taken 12y ago
We'll all be a little bit later somewhere and nobody has to die in traffic collisions.
eric_cc 12y ago
I would assume the same thing that would happen to some asshole standing at a busy intersection today holding up traffic by standing in the road.
robrenaud 12y ago
Standing in the middle of the intersection is going to be an effective way to stop cars even if they have human drivers.
prawn 12y ago
The cars will gradually edge forward until the pedestrian is no longer an issue. That trolling option is available to pedestrians now and I don't encounter it day to day.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Someone will get angry enough to call the police to deal with that asshole. Also, every car will be a source of court-admissible proof that the person in question was in fact disturbing the traffic purposefully.

scrabble 12y ago

I'm wondering how a robot car is going to park in a driveway -- or in a parking lot.

elchief 12y ago
Probably better than everyone here.
prawn 12y ago
Very easily. Not to mention that storage will be simpler as cars will be able to park closely together without requiring doors to open before moving to where you can enter them, or in elevated storage. At some point in the future, most people will be unlikely to own a car (just use one on demand) so their driveway will go mostly unused and their garage will be used for something else also.
- scrabble 12y ago
  The issue comes up somewhere like a townhouse complex. Maps does not contain detailed data on assigned parking spaces and the like for these areas. This is not an issue if everyone is using self-driving cars. But when only some people are, I don't see how you'd avoid the need for cars to take over in these instances. Same with street driving really, you already have self-parking cars, but the car would need to be able to not only determine where the parking spaces are (and deal with issues like faded parking lines) but also determine whether or not there are any laws restricting the use of that space -- not only handicapped spaces, but also time of day and week. Again, not an issue when everyone is in self-driving cars because most of these rules seem designed to optimize traffic flow, but until that point (and maybe for a time after) these laws will remain in affect.
  - prawn 12y ago
    I imagine that eventually cars will park themselves in dedicated areas or move on to another job and most of us won't leave a car in a particular place and expect it to be there when we return. Most apartment owners would probably elect to use their parking space for a storage capsule and then subscribe to a robo-car service. The car would be waiting when they got downstairs and leave to go elsewhere when it returned them home. Eventually, street parking will disappear. If I still want to be driven to work, the car will drop me at the front door and then head elsewhere. In the evening, a different car will likely arrive for pick-up. Any cars not on a job or driving to a job would head to a depot for charging, service or storage.

josephschmoe 12y ago

Between truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers, that's 3 million people who should look for another line of work when this starts to happen.

etep 12y ago

Inspirational.

robotresearcher 12y ago

There are lots of subtleties in in-town driving. For example, the Google car will crawl its nose forward just a bit to indicate when it thinks its turn has come at 3 and 4-way stops. This is a strong signal to the other drivers that the car is about to make the turn, and reduces the frequency of contentions inside the intersection. It's a nice touch to have the robot replicate behaviour that most people are not even aware they are using.

cseelus 12y ago

Apparently Mercedes Benz has come quite far regarding autonomous driving. In September 2013 they let one of their S-Class models drive the historic route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany with some journalist(s) on board[1]. On this route the worlds first long-distance (194km/121mi) ride in a motorized car was undertaken in 1888 by Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz, who developed, what is known today as the worlds first modern automobile.[2] This route contains interurban as well as urban parts. The prototype car nicknamed "Bertha" is not easily recognizable from a standard S-Class model, which already contains most of the systems necessary to enable autonomous driving. [1] Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fauto%2Faktuell%2Fautonomes-fahren-unterwegs-mit-einer-s-klasse-auf-autopilot-a-920803.html http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route

frik 12y ago
I see no Lidar. What are the sensors? "With sensors Bertha analyzed their environment [...] detailed and peppered with additional information navigation map" I suspect a front-radar, camera and a detailed navigation map with GPS points especially for this route.

_zen 12y ago

I think the coolest thing about self-driving cars is they can create a mesh network with one another. If I'm driving to work and a traffic accident occurs 2 miles ahead on my route, with multiple self-driving cars present at the accident, those cars can share traffic information with all self-driving cars in the area. My car will then plan an alternative route around the accident before I've even seen it. Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

astrange 12y ago
> Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering. There's little purpose in encrypting a signal like this. You're still proposing to trust random cars you've never met before, so how would you know which messages are fake and which aren't?

hrktb 12y ago

> Jaywalking pedestrians. There was a episode on this on the 99% invisible podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-... The above page has photos and a full transcript of the episode, I very highly recommand it. This piece reminded me of the 'problem' of jaywalking because the complexity the self driving Googe car boast to be able to handle, could also be instead reduced or anhilated by adequate urban policies. There are movements to get the car out of urban areas [1] or at least make the pedestrian the 'owner' of the street, and I think self driving cars should be positionned more as an auto-pilot for long distances, rather than attempt to make sense of the current chaos in high density areas. [1] http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg ("you are the traffic", a Roumanian poster seen in /r/bycicling)

midas007 12y ago

The interesting problems are: - tracking thousands of objects' trajectories to avoid as many threat-weighted collisions as possible. (think NYC times square) - not going too fast when visibility is blocked FYI: When I was at Trimble Nav, there were self-driving farm equipment demonstrated c. 2000.

monksy 12y ago

I wonder how that deals with potholes or roads that lack the proper markings or one way streets. Chicago has both of those.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Probably the same way humans do, only better. Computers do have memory, as well as access to external information.

intended 12y ago

Reading a lot of comments here, the theme seems to be that the benefits will trickle down to the average consumer. I can see immediate cases where it's just going to go to those with sufficient economic muscle. Less need for a garage means smaller houses, and more of them (for example). Improved insurance? Probably the same insurance premiums (inflation adjusted), with a higher premium for more human miles driven. If there is money on the table, it will get taken by those with the wherewithal to grab it.

jpatokal 12y ago
Which is why all the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution went to the feudal lords in their castles? As a trivial counterexample, since automated taxis will be considerably cheaper than human-driven ones, they'll become an affordable commodity usable for day-to-day travel, instead of a rare luxury used only when absolutely necessary (or somebody else foots the bill).

frik 12y ago

We need a DIY Lidar or a cheap Lidar. Any ideas or existing projects? (the 3D scanning device on top of the Google car, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar ) The Lidar that Google uses costs 80k dollars, more than most cars.