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I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers. IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it con

I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers. IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues are would be fascinating, but this ain't it. "The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either." As a human I sometimes can't tell the nature of something on the road at speed. They gave an easy example (rock vs paper) but IRL it is usually things that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway. "Urmson also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off." People aren't that great at this either, especially in traffic where the hole is obscured until the last second, at least an automated car that reports home could, via various sensors, detect hitting "something that felt like a pothole" and send that information out to other cars in the region.

learc83 12y ago
>that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. A good example, but even if the trash bag is empty it can cause problems. I ran over an empty trash bag once, and it got stuck to my muffler and melted onto it. Made a huge mess and could have potentially caught fire.
Schwolop 12y ago
Negative obstacles (e.g. potholes) in particular are trouble for line-of-sight flight time sensing modalities like laser & radar. The lower the sensor is mounted on the vehicle, the longer (in direction of travel) the hole has to be before you get a sufficiently large difference to notice between returns from the same beam in subsequent time-steps. This is of course worsened further by increasing vehicle speed. It is somewhat mitigated by having multiple beams, i.e. the Velodyne laser scanner has 64, but even still only a few are hitting the obstacle and surrounds at any one time. Some of the more interesting research in this area uses infrared to detect the change in heat of a shadowed hole versus flat ground. Of course, that only works when there's sunshine to provide the heat source. P.S. Google people reading this (Urmson, Ferguson, etc), please consider this my annual reminder of the awesomeness of your Google Sydney office and the large quantities of autonomous field robotics engineers training and working within walking distance of it, for wages that could be doubled without your budgets even noticing...
ewoodrich 12y ago
>So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway. Exactly. These are edge cases that will undoubtedly be better handled as the technology matures in the near future. There no reason that these (still very speculative) issues should slow down adoption.
robotresearcher 12y ago
> People aren't that great at this either The robot car has to be considerably better than people to become acceptable. This is a serious burden for the technology.
- agildehaus 12y ago
  Accidents are usually caused by human unpredictability, lack of attention, terrible reaction time, stupidity, narrow perception, inability to follow traffic rules, and the effects of various drugs. Driverless cars mitigate all of these issues. I would feel much better riding a bike in the vicinity of a self-driving vehicle than any random human. There are a number of issues to iron out yet and a lot of testing to do. But make no mistake, they're already far better.
  - robotresearcher 12y ago
    They are currently stumped by situations that humans are OK in. They are not "already far better" in all situations. Even if they are better on average, my point is that this is not enough. If the world was run on pure rationality, they would have only to be epsilon better on average to be adopted. In the actual world, they are going to need to be very much better, and have very very few failure cases to be adopted.

learc83 12y ago

>that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. A good example, but even if the trash bag is empty it can cause problems. I ran over an empty trash bag once, and it got stuck to my muffler and melted onto it. Made a huge mess and could have potentially caught fire.

Schwolop 12y ago

Negative obstacles (e.g. potholes) in particular are trouble for line-of-sight flight time sensing modalities like laser & radar. The lower the sensor is mounted on the vehicle, the longer (in direction of travel) the hole has to be before you get a sufficiently large difference to notice between returns from the same beam in subsequent time-steps. This is of course worsened further by increasing vehicle speed. It is somewhat mitigated by having multiple beams, i.e. the Velodyne laser scanner has 64, but even still only a few are hitting the obstacle and surrounds at any one time. Some of the more interesting research in this area uses infrared to detect the change in heat of a shadowed hole versus flat ground. Of course, that only works when there's sunshine to provide the heat source. P.S. Google people reading this (Urmson, Ferguson, etc), please consider this my annual reminder of the awesomeness of your Google Sydney office and the large quantities of autonomous field robotics engineers training and working within walking distance of it, for wages that could be doubled without your budgets even noticing...

ewoodrich 12y ago

>So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway. Exactly. These are edge cases that will undoubtedly be better handled as the technology matures in the near future. There no reason that these (still very speculative) issues should slow down adoption.

robotresearcher 12y ago

> People aren't that great at this either The robot car has to be considerably better than people to become acceptable. This is a serious burden for the technology.

agildehaus 12y ago
Accidents are usually caused by human unpredictability, lack of attention, terrible reaction time, stupidity, narrow perception, inability to follow traffic rules, and the effects of various drugs. Driverless cars mitigate all of these issues. I would feel much better riding a bike in the vicinity of a self-driving vehicle than any random human. There are a number of issues to iron out yet and a lot of testing to do. But make no mistake, they're already far better.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  They are currently stumped by situations that humans are OK in. They are not "already far better" in all situations. Even if they are better on average, my point is that this is not enough. If the world was run on pure rationality, they would have only to be epsilon better on average to be adopted. In the actual world, they are going to need to be very much better, and have very very few failure cases to be adopted.