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If lots of these cars were on the road would these sensors interfere with each other?
by dmm 12y ago
If lots of these cars were on the road would these sensors interfere with each other?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoProbably a bit, yes, but there are ways to filter out the interference to some extent. Anyway, I'm strongly hoping that they'll make cars that talk to each other - so instead many cars adding noise to each other's readings, we'll have cars that share data and dynamically delegate the task of detailed region mapping to few cars that would not interfere with each other.
- aetherson 12y agoHow would you handle malicious actors in such a situation?
- meowface 12y agoThat's a good question, and it makes me think that for that reason, Google probably won't actually be able to implement what the above post is suggesting. The most that can happen is each car will probably end up sending Google certain diagnostic information, but actual environmental sensing will have to be done by the car itself, with maybe some help from aerial cameras or satellites that Google controls.
- jonlucc 12y agoMaybe by voting? It probably shouldn't be used for the most vital aspects, but it would be less likely to have 5 or 6 malicious cars around than just 1.
- icebraining 12y agoUnless there are no real cars, just a device pretending to be many. Maybe we need a proof-of-car-presence :)
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWell, self-driving cars have eyes (err, LIDARs and IR cameras), it's just a matter of software ;).
- netrus 12y agoI don't know, is this really an important scenario? If I wanted to harm a specific individual, I would manipulate the individuals car (like I would today). And who wants to drive an undirected attack on everyone close? That would be considered a quite serious crime that takes a substantial technical effort, with little to gain.
- sp332 12y agoArrest them?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoProbably in the same way you handle malicious actors now - people deliberately obstructing view of other cars, shining laser pointers at drivers, etc. A very important observation is that those are extremely rare events. In a way, humans are also machines, and we have very similar attack vectors, so just extending our current solutions might be good enough to accommodate self-driving cars on our roads.
- aetherson 12y agoI think that the way you handle malicious actors now is that people know that they have a laser in their eyes. This would be more like "what if someone could just make another car or obstacle invisible to you, and you have no way of knowing it." I agree it is a very rare event, and will always continue to be. But it would need to be handled, and handled in ways other than, "Hi, here's a 100 car pile-up." Similarly, and probably less rarely, you'd need to handle scenarios in which another actor wasn't malicious per se, but faulty to a degree that it was functionally malicious. Of course, we've always had to handle the idea that somebody might be driving a car with bad brakes, and that's dangerous enough, but before now a car with bad brakes wouldn't also make the brakes bad for ten cars around them. I think that's worthy of some contemplation.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI agree with the sentiment. There's a lot to consider and test in practice, though any of those scenarios don't sound like show-stoppers. After all, humans are also machines, and where a person can "know that they have a laser in their eyes", a machine can equally well realize that one of its sensors suddenly started reporting weird results that don't match the expectations and that don't seem to agree with other sensors onboard or with what other cars nearby are reporting. We'll have to sort out a lot of those scenarios, many by means of "testing in production", but as long as self-driving cars can outperform humans on average, we'll be better off.