3 ms·

Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at

Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because of the incline of the hill you can't even see it until it's less than a few feet in front of you. I'd hope they figure out how to detect these but it seems like a pretty difficult problem.

larubbio 12y ago
But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.
- robszumski 12y ago
  These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder. Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.
  - BrandonMarc 12y ago
    why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination. Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?
konstruktor 12y ago
If you need to know its location to circumnavigate a pothole, you are to fast to react to other, unexpected, obstacles.
orky56 12y ago
Not a coincidence that Google bought Waze, a crowd sourced traffic and warning detection system. They are definitely cognizant that subjective data is just as important as the objective data picked up by its sensors. This is a great use case that we should expect to be handled.

larubbio 12y ago

But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.

robszumski 12y ago
These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder. Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination. Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?

konstruktor 12y ago

If you need to know its location to circumnavigate a pothole, you are to fast to react to other, unexpected, obstacles.

orky56 12y ago

Not a coincidence that Google bought Waze, a crowd sourced traffic and warning detection system. They are definitely cognizant that subjective data is just as important as the objective data picked up by its sensors. This is a great use case that we should expect to be handled.