6 ms·

“The test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption, and merging traffic all by themselves,” This is an important step, although I must say th

• protomyth 12y ago
  Given the driving conditions in Sweden and the years of experience Volvo has as a car company, I would bet they will be able to deploy and all weather version before Google.
  • haberman 12y ago
    This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.
    • Qworg 12y ago
      Google's system is not yet arbitrary. They prerun the roads the system drives on. I'm excited to see more "in the wild" units - more competition and innovation is always a good thing.
      • ghaff 12y ago
        This quote from a long New York Times article on Google is highly relevant: "The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-global-domination-dont-ask-why-ask-where.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-...
        • toomuchtodo 12y ago
          So Google self driving cars run in a virtual environment prebuilt for them by their street view cars being manually driven, with sensor input to fill in the realtime data variables (people, other cars, traffic light state). Brilliant!
      • haberman 12y ago
        Yes, it is clear that the Google system needs quite a lot of data about the roads it is driving on. But given those roads with a high amount of detail, the Google system can (from my understanding) support keying in an arbitrary destination. I may be reading too much into this, but when I read "test route" in the article, it gave me the impression that the Volvo approach is sort of like a train without the tracks -- only able to follow a pre-programmed route from point A to point B.
        • protomyth 12y ago
          No, they picked a test route to be decently representative and allow them to setup their tests correctly. It is not an A to B thing. role_v's comment is a pretty good explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495 The quote ghaff posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698610 it seems like you are describing Google more than Volvo.
          • haberman 12y ago
            > role_v's comment is a pretty good explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495 That's not an explanation, it's speculation just like my speculation is.
            • protomyth 12y ago
              http://www.volvocars.com/intl/top/corporate/news/pages/default.aspx?itemid=410 http://www.volvocars.com/intl/top/corporate/news/pages/defau... note the: Our aim is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe ‘harbour’ if the driver for any reason is unable to regain control,” explains Erik Coelingh, Technical Specialist at Volvo Car Group. Plus the goals listed. Volvo did do a land-train style project called SARTRE http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072088_sartre-self-driving-car-initiative-enters-final-phase-video http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072088_sartre-self-drivi...
      • danielweber 12y ago
        I don't see "Google needs to pre-map the route" as a hurdle at all. Even if Google had never been in my area, I would not mind one bit having to do my daily commute manually for a week while the car builds more and more detailed maps of the route, if it saved me the hassle of the commute for months thereafter. Plus, every time the automatic car goes over the road, it's presumably checking its prior maps and flagging any anomalies from its preset mission. It still needs to recognize a new stop sign, but if a stop sign disappears, it will stop anyway while waiting for an answer on "was it was taken out on purpose, or did some kids steal it?".
        • RogerL 12y ago
          This is the basis of the SLAM algorithms (SLAM = simultaneous localization and mapping). As you say, if we all had these cars, we'd quickly know about changes. Of course, the hard problem is finding the new lights, but if this was to become mainstream I think a lot of things would change. For example, if a town decides to install a red light, they don't just install one, they register it in a national database.
        • greeneggs 12y ago
          If the car could map the route automatically, then it wouldn't need the pre-map in the first place. The problem is that creating the map routes currently requires expert human attention. Driving your daily commute manually for a week won't do any good.
    • roel_v 12y ago
      But those 50 kms are, according to the article, 'main commuter arteries' which to me makes it seem that they selected a small set of roads not to make the driving circumstances easier but to be able to more easily monitor the cars that drive there and to be able to reproduce similar situations more easily, to test improvements to certain algorithms or hardware. So basically they're testing under the 'worst' circumstances, making it likely that it will perform well on 'easy' routes as well. This approach makes sense - what good is it to clock 1000's of kms of test drives on straight roads with no traffic and in broad daylight?
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      • haberman 12y ago
        It seems unlikely to me that the supported routes have train tracks, construction cones, bike lanes, etc. -- the kinds of difficult problems of urban driving that Google has put a lot of resources into solving.
        • englishVoodoo 12y ago
          Might be true that the supported route are favourable, Gothenburg however do operate streetcars/trams together with regular buses as public transportation. These tracks will be hard to avoid in the city.
        • mkempe 12y ago
          Driving in Göteborg is by no means a piece of cake. Unlike most American cities, there are a lot of pedestrians and bicycles, plus trams, and by necessity they sometimes take priority over car traffic. However, one major traffic simplification in Europe is that there is no such insanity as "go ahead and turn right even when the light is red -- and run over crossing pedestrians unless they back off."
          • steven777400 12y ago
            "The pedestrian didn't know which way to run, so I ran him over."
    • alkonaut 12y ago
      I think they are probably trying to solve the same problem from two different directions. Google appears to be making an advanced and expensive solution to "full" autonomous driving. The limitation will not be in where it can go, but it is initially limited in weather/environmental conditions. The target audience is likely not production cars in the short term, but a system like theirs can for example make their street view photography cars autonomous: they can work in summer, stop if it rains, and it doesn't matter too much if they cost twice as much as a regular car. It will of course be a regulation nightmare to allow the driverless cars out in the street though. Volvo on the other hand will probably try to make a simpler and much less expensive solution that will have to work in rain/darkness/snow, and not add a significant amount to the cost of the car. Clearly that means having other restrictions, presumably in the overall intelligence or in which roads it works on. Volvo's system is likely intended for making day-to-day travel more secure at the lowest cost possible, not for creating completely autonomous navigation and problem solving (e.g. 4 way stop turn-taking). It must work in almost any environmental conditions, but it will probably require a driver at all times, and will almost certainly not work everywhere.
      • threeseed 12y ago
        Never thought of this before but you might be spot on. Maybe Google has no intention of making autonomous cars for normal use but exclusively for Street View. Street View is hopelessly out of date in many places (4 years in some parts of Sydney for example) and it has to be super expensive to keep thousands of people continuously driving around the world. And Street View will likely be a vital and profitable data source if VR/AR (in all its forms) is ever used en masse.
        • pedrocr 12y ago
          >Maybe Google has no intention of making autonomous cars for normal use but exclusively for Street View. Sounds like too much expense for just that. If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car. They may very well want to start by using Street View to validate the technology but the end-game must be larger.
    • nmcfarl 12y ago
      In addition to what other’s have said it stuck me as very important that Volvo is having customers, not employees drive these cars. I imagine they react very differently, and will be better at simulating what the real world is like.
      • protomyth 12y ago
        "Volvo is having customers, not employees drive these cars" Given the court system, I don't think you could do that in the US.
  • acchow 12y ago
    Can you explain what expertise as a car company has to do with AI?
    • protomyth 12y ago
      After you explain what expertise a search engine / advertising company has with cars?
• sscalia 12y ago
  Negative. We'll never see a Google self driving car commercially. It's a science experiment.
• ams6110 12y ago
  lane following, speed adaption, and merging traffic all by themselves Well, that's better than most human Volvo drivers can do, by my experience. Whenever I see a car make a bone-headed move in traffic, chances are it's a Volvo.