6 ms·

While I certainly agree that self-driving farm equipment is revolutionary, I'd argue that Google's technological advances are in the field of being able to unde

While I certainly agree that self-driving farm equipment is revolutionary, I'd argue that Google's technological advances are in the field of being able to understand how to drive on a road which marked for humans to drive on, and which is simultaneously in use by human drivers as well. I'm sure that there are problems and issues which arise from navigating a field and manipulating whatever equipment you've got for whatever task you're working on that I'm just not fully appreciating. However, I really question if that task is anywhere near as complex as safely navigating traffic while obeying all the laws of the road when you can't even be sure of the state of the road you'll be travelling on. It's just a totally different problem being solved. This is apples and oranges.

jonlucc 11y ago
I think you're correct. I can vividly remember a local news story from at least 15 years ago that talked about self-driving cars being just around the corner. All it would take is putting sensors in every roadway and having dedicated lanes for them. I was pretty young and excitable, and I could not figure out why we weren't putting those sensors in as roads were replaced around the city. Google requires none of that insane retrofitting, and is therefore much more likely to be useful.
- walshemj 11y ago
  I can rember a local agricultural college in the UK (silsoe now part of cranfield) experimenting with self driving tractors back in the late 70's
- netcan 11y ago
  I think this is a valid approach, in theory. IE, find some limited use case for a self driving cab service in a city and try to make the problem more like an agricultural field. OTOH, it would require a city or state to actively pursue this kind of a bleeding edge technology, make decisions and possibly even develop the technology. Maybe there are some municipalities out there with the competence for this, but not many. I'm not as down on government abilities as some on here, but I think you have to admit that making such a technologically innovative, blue sky project a public one seems like a recipe for disaster. The self driving cars can just develop on the free market. If the cars are good enough to go on normal roads people will buy them. I imagine that if they are prevalent enough, cities will then gradually tailor the infrastructure for them. Still, there must be someplace where the smarter infrastructure could take some of the hard problems away for self driving cars and get a nice demo going. Some small town, large army base, some specific city hoping routes?
- dworin 11y ago
  The vision of self-driving cars using special roads has actually been around since the 50s. Here's a commercial GM put together about it (admittedly using different technology at the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk
higherpurpose 11y ago
This smacks of "Apple didn't invent tablets, Microsoft did!!" kind of thinking. Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally. Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.
- vinay427 11y ago
  Exactly, which is why people who claim that Apple invented tablets still deserve to be corrected.
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    That's OK, I'm sure when you delightfully correct people about this oversight, you don't skim over things like the Newton or the Palm Pilot, or the prop from 2001 that was hugely inspirational, and that you go into great detail about all the technical and usability differences between iPads and early-2000s tablet PCs. I'm sure you give fair and equal coverage to all of these topics when you are correcting people, since you seem to care about history and stuff. Just giving you the benefit of the doubt here.
    - shiftpgdn 11y ago
      I bought a Compaq TC1000 when I graduated highschool for $750~. It was one of the very first "Tablet" PCs. It received a LOT of very positive attention when I used it on campus in college. It was a great machine and was very usable even with limited OS support. Microsoft had a marketing problem (they still do) and not a usability problem.
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Did Apple invent the usable tablet OS with a decent amount of software?
markbnj 11y ago
Yeah, agreed. The overlap technologies of position fixing and mechanical control have actually been solved for a long time now. The current interest in self-driving vehicles is based on advances in sensors and processing to detect environmental conditions and hazards on roadways and in places where people commonly drive cars.
- SomeStupidPoint 11y ago
  You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people? I'll agree that roadways have much more to do with avoiding traffic, but I don't think that the restrictions on vehicle operation or avoiding hazards on the terrain or having to understand and plan according to layouts devised by and primarily for humans is substantially different between the two, but rather, a difference of parameters. (Farm equipment maintains a lower speed and for a different reason, but still has to monitor and obey rules about maximum speed under various conditions, for instance.) I think you're underestimating the degree to which the two tasks are fundamentally the same.
  - markbnj 11y ago
    >> You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people? Coordinating with other moving equipment I did not address, because that is too broad a description. As far as hazard avoidance is concerned I don't know the state of the art for farm equipment, but I don't think they are as focused on fully autonomous operation, which has been the goal on the transportation side for some time now. In any event, there is obvious overlap in a number of areas, but I simply don't think the premise of the posted article holds up. Farm equipment is not the "real revolution" in autonomous transportation. It's merely one area in which some of the dependent technologies have already seen the light of day.
  - emcrazyone 11y ago
    "You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people?" Nope, they don't need to worry about those things. Self driving cars and tractors adhere to ISO-25119 and within that, tractors adhere to agricultural performance level which doesn't have the same risk. Self driving tractors are required to have an operator in the cab and they are not allowed on public roadways with "auto guidance" engaged. I work for Case New Holland - John Deere competitor.
navait 11y ago
There's something to be said for starting with a simplified version of a complex problem. Driving on a road vs. a field is apple and oranges, but I'm sure it was a useful starting point for building road vehicles.
kbenson 11y ago
I agree. A farm is a type of factory, and thus has fairly controlled conditions compared to a public thoroughfare. Any number of solutions could work for a farm that would be untenable for self driving cars, such as marking the expected area with sensors to define the working area, outlining the area on a GPS map, running the equipment over the area one or more times to teach it, etc. None of these work as a general purpose solution to a self driving car, and they might not even be progenitors to the self driving technology we end up with. A solution to a highly constrained version of a problem may not be applicable to the general purpose problem in any way. Edit: mean to say "may not be applicable" in last sentence.
awor 11y ago
In a somewhat tangentially related vein, Suncor Energy, one of the top Oil Sands mining companies in Canada, announced they're replacing their fleet of heavy haul trucks with automated ones[0] by 2020, in the artcle they interview a automated truck industry rep who basically calls the use-case 'simple': >"Really, what the industry is doing here is picking the low-hanging fruit. It's a lot easier to design and operate an autonomous truck on private property like the oil sands than it is on a on a public road. And there are a number of motivations. Computers drive better and more safely and better than humans." [0] http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-church-the-blob-summer-books-driverless-trucks-more-1.3119902/will-suncor-s-driverless-trucks-put-alberta-truck-drivers-out-of-work-1.3119963 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-ch...
awor 11y ago
In a somewhat tangentially related vein, Suncor Energy, one of the top Oil Sands mining companies in Canada, announced they're replacing their fleet of heavy haul trucks with automated ones[0] by 2020, in the artcle they interview a automated truck industry rep who basically calls the use-case 'simple': >"Really, what the industry is doing here is picking the low-hanging fruit. It's a lot easier to design and operate an autonomous truck on private property like the oil sands than it is on a on a public road. And there are a number of motivations. Computers drive better and more safely and better than humans." [0] http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-church-the-blob-summer-books-driverless-trucks-more-1.3119902/will-suncor-s-driverless-trucks-put-alberta-truck-drivers-out-of-work-1.3119963 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-ch...
bonestamp2 11y ago
Exactly. Self steering sailboats existed before self driving tractors, but again... keeping a sailboat on a specific bearing is far easier than turning a tractor with any number of attachments towing behind it. Nobody came along and said what Deere did with tractors wasn't original because sailboats could auto steer. What about autopilot on airplanes? The comparisons are endless. It's an interesting article on its own, but any claim to inventing self driving cars on the farm is rather shortsighted... every invention borrows from the past and contributes to the future. The same is true for art, literature, industrial design, cooking, medicine, and almost any other creation. Lets not discount the invention of the self driving tractor, but lets also not discount the leaps that have been made since then in AI and computer learning for understanding road markers, traffic behavior, traffic signals, routing, crash avoidance, parking assistance, etc.
Pxtl 11y ago
Exactly. Self-driving farm equipment is more in the category of the Roomba than it is in the category of self-driving cars.
- geon 11y ago
  A million dollar Roomba, but yeah. More interesting is to compare the stakes. On a farm, you have a worst case of ruined farm land and equipment. On the road there are human lives.
ytdht 11y ago
yeah but where can you buy a Google self-driving car? and how many other companies are also working on the problem? many.
samstave 11y ago
I really would love to see how a Google car would handle chaos of third world metros, like Mumbai, Manilla etc...
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I imagine a total fail. The car is programmed with an expectation of fairness - it assumes folks stop at lights, observer lanes and take turns at intersections, at least most of the time. In those other cities the locals would learn to game the autocars, taking the initiative from them at every interaction, leaving them impotently idling at a busy intersection waiting for somebody, anybody, to give them an opening.
  - andygates 11y ago
    IIRC, they're working at "fair but not doormat" - yes, gameable, but not so supine as to wait until the rush hour is over before nosing forward to indicate a desire to turn.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Need to review films of rush-hour traffic in Delhi. Cars stream pell-mell through intersections as a living fluid. No such thing as nosing forward to indicate anything. Its a whole different world.

jonlucc 11y ago

I think you're correct. I can vividly remember a local news story from at least 15 years ago that talked about self-driving cars being just around the corner. All it would take is putting sensors in every roadway and having dedicated lanes for them. I was pretty young and excitable, and I could not figure out why we weren't putting those sensors in as roads were replaced around the city. Google requires none of that insane retrofitting, and is therefore much more likely to be useful.

walshemj 11y ago
I can rember a local agricultural college in the UK (silsoe now part of cranfield) experimenting with self driving tractors back in the late 70's
netcan 11y ago
I think this is a valid approach, in theory. IE, find some limited use case for a self driving cab service in a city and try to make the problem more like an agricultural field. OTOH, it would require a city or state to actively pursue this kind of a bleeding edge technology, make decisions and possibly even develop the technology. Maybe there are some municipalities out there with the competence for this, but not many. I'm not as down on government abilities as some on here, but I think you have to admit that making such a technologically innovative, blue sky project a public one seems like a recipe for disaster. The self driving cars can just develop on the free market. If the cars are good enough to go on normal roads people will buy them. I imagine that if they are prevalent enough, cities will then gradually tailor the infrastructure for them. Still, there must be someplace where the smarter infrastructure could take some of the hard problems away for self driving cars and get a nice demo going. Some small town, large army base, some specific city hoping routes?
dworin 11y ago
The vision of self-driving cars using special roads has actually been around since the 50s. Here's a commercial GM put together about it (admittedly using different technology at the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk

higherpurpose 11y ago

This smacks of "Apple didn't invent tablets, Microsoft did!!" kind of thinking. Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally. Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.

vinay427 11y ago
Exactly, which is why people who claim that Apple invented tablets still deserve to be corrected.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  That's OK, I'm sure when you delightfully correct people about this oversight, you don't skim over things like the Newton or the Palm Pilot, or the prop from 2001 that was hugely inspirational, and that you go into great detail about all the technical and usability differences between iPads and early-2000s tablet PCs. I'm sure you give fair and equal coverage to all of these topics when you are correcting people, since you seem to care about history and stuff. Just giving you the benefit of the doubt here.
  - shiftpgdn 11y ago
    I bought a Compaq TC1000 when I graduated highschool for $750~. It was one of the very first "Tablet" PCs. It received a LOT of very positive attention when I used it on campus in college. It was a great machine and was very usable even with limited OS support. Microsoft had a marketing problem (they still do) and not a usability problem.
- mavhc 11y ago
  Did Apple invent the usable tablet OS with a decent amount of software?

markbnj 11y ago

Yeah, agreed. The overlap technologies of position fixing and mechanical control have actually been solved for a long time now. The current interest in self-driving vehicles is based on advances in sensors and processing to detect environmental conditions and hazards on roadways and in places where people commonly drive cars.

SomeStupidPoint 11y ago
You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people? I'll agree that roadways have much more to do with avoiding traffic, but I don't think that the restrictions on vehicle operation or avoiding hazards on the terrain or having to understand and plan according to layouts devised by and primarily for humans is substantially different between the two, but rather, a difference of parameters. (Farm equipment maintains a lower speed and for a different reason, but still has to monitor and obey rules about maximum speed under various conditions, for instance.) I think you're underestimating the degree to which the two tasks are fundamentally the same.
- markbnj 11y ago
  >> You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people? Coordinating with other moving equipment I did not address, because that is too broad a description. As far as hazard avoidance is concerned I don't know the state of the art for farm equipment, but I don't think they are as focused on fully autonomous operation, which has been the goal on the transportation side for some time now. In any event, there is obvious overlap in a number of areas, but I simply don't think the premise of the posted article holds up. Farm equipment is not the "real revolution" in autonomous transportation. It's merely one area in which some of the dependent technologies have already seen the light of day.
- emcrazyone 11y ago
  "You don't think farm equipment has to navigate unexpected hazards or coordinate with other moving equipment or people?" Nope, they don't need to worry about those things. Self driving cars and tractors adhere to ISO-25119 and within that, tractors adhere to agricultural performance level which doesn't have the same risk. Self driving tractors are required to have an operator in the cab and they are not allowed on public roadways with "auto guidance" engaged. I work for Case New Holland - John Deere competitor.

navait 11y ago

There's something to be said for starting with a simplified version of a complex problem. Driving on a road vs. a field is apple and oranges, but I'm sure it was a useful starting point for building road vehicles.

kbenson 11y ago

I agree. A farm is a type of factory, and thus has fairly controlled conditions compared to a public thoroughfare. Any number of solutions could work for a farm that would be untenable for self driving cars, such as marking the expected area with sensors to define the working area, outlining the area on a GPS map, running the equipment over the area one or more times to teach it, etc. None of these work as a general purpose solution to a self driving car, and they might not even be progenitors to the self driving technology we end up with. A solution to a highly constrained version of a problem may not be applicable to the general purpose problem in any way. Edit: mean to say "may not be applicable" in last sentence.

awor 11y ago

In a somewhat tangentially related vein, Suncor Energy, one of the top Oil Sands mining companies in Canada, announced they're replacing their fleet of heavy haul trucks with automated ones[0] by 2020, in the artcle they interview a automated truck industry rep who basically calls the use-case 'simple': >"Really, what the industry is doing here is picking the low-hanging fruit. It's a lot easier to design and operate an autonomous truck on private property like the oil sands than it is on a on a public road. And there are a number of motivations. Computers drive better and more safely and better than humans." [0] http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-church-the-blob-summer-books-driverless-trucks-more-1.3119902/will-suncor-s-driverless-trucks-put-alberta-truck-drivers-out-of-work-1.3119963 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-ch...

awor 11y ago

bonestamp2 11y ago

Exactly. Self steering sailboats existed before self driving tractors, but again... keeping a sailboat on a specific bearing is far easier than turning a tractor with any number of attachments towing behind it. Nobody came along and said what Deere did with tractors wasn't original because sailboats could auto steer. What about autopilot on airplanes? The comparisons are endless. It's an interesting article on its own, but any claim to inventing self driving cars on the farm is rather shortsighted... every invention borrows from the past and contributes to the future. The same is true for art, literature, industrial design, cooking, medicine, and almost any other creation. Lets not discount the invention of the self driving tractor, but lets also not discount the leaps that have been made since then in AI and computer learning for understanding road markers, traffic behavior, traffic signals, routing, crash avoidance, parking assistance, etc.

Pxtl 11y ago

Exactly. Self-driving farm equipment is more in the category of the Roomba than it is in the category of self-driving cars.

geon 11y ago
A million dollar Roomba, but yeah. More interesting is to compare the stakes. On a farm, you have a worst case of ruined farm land and equipment. On the road there are human lives.

ytdht 11y ago

yeah but where can you buy a Google self-driving car? and how many other companies are also working on the problem? many.

samstave 11y ago

I really would love to see how a Google car would handle chaos of third world metros, like Mumbai, Manilla etc...

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
I imagine a total fail. The car is programmed with an expectation of fairness - it assumes folks stop at lights, observer lanes and take turns at intersections, at least most of the time. In those other cities the locals would learn to game the autocars, taking the initiative from them at every interaction, leaving them impotently idling at a busy intersection waiting for somebody, anybody, to give them an opening.
- andygates 11y ago
  IIRC, they're working at "fair but not doormat" - yes, gameable, but not so supine as to wait until the rush hour is over before nosing forward to indicate a desire to turn.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Need to review films of rush-hour traffic in Delhi. Cars stream pell-mell through intersections as a living fluid. No such thing as nosing forward to indicate anything. Its a whole different world.