Communicating with self-driving car

[bigmuzzie]

Evilex said:

bigmuzzie said:

Pulling out from a side road in busy traffic would be interesting - could you flash to let one out, would they let you out or could you sit there for 20 minutes not moving?

Car parks - driving round for that last parking space, waiting for a car to leave so you can have it. That could all get very complex / frustrating very quickly.

As already said, changeable weather conditions, fog, ice, snow even direct sunlight could obscure cameras - then there's water splashes from big puddles.

Would all the cars be networked and communicate so they were aware of danger in the area or cold you see 20 cars all pile into the same wall from ice?

When little Johnny runs out from behind a wall and a human may instinctively swerve would a driverless? What if the options were to crash into another car or hit a person, how would it react? The same in every situation or would speed be a factor? How would it cope with unknowns - foreign items in the road for example (A horse, deer, dead cow, cardboard box) .

There is a lot of logic to programme into a car to deal with that a human brain learns to deal with and although may get it a bit wrong can often just get away with it, when it's a binary yes and or situation I'm not sure how good it would be.

Some good points there, and they are exactly the sort of circumstances that the programmers should seek to address.

However...
Nearly everyone is treating autonomous vehicles as being comparable to their human driven equivalents.
They simply aren't.

They should (will?) be programmed to fail-safe, and err on the side of caution in EVERY and ANY given situation.
They'd never drive so fast that they couldn't stop in the distance that they could detect as being clear... with an extra margin of safety built in. When it comes to such detection, there are myriad options, mainly from military applications;

RADAR
LIDAR
Infra red
Optical
Vehicle to vehicle communication

And so on.

As for the parking, surely they'd form an orderly queue with the occupants locked in so they couldn't just hop out, drop their passengers off and go and park themselves, to be recalled later to pick up their passengers.

Many of the answers lie in studying human behaviours, and offsetting our disruptive and illogical attempts to circumvent existing systems in order to gain a few seconds, secure some "advantage" or just get one up on a fellow road user.

The trouble is, will we be able to tolerate allowing machines to have the final say?

To programme a fail safe a caution could cause gridlock in seconds, it's often the reactive tolerance that humans posses that prevents some situations escalating. That U turn when there's an accident, crossing to the wrong side of the road if there's a blockage with the courtesy to let a few through at a time.

The radar, lidar, sonar et al sounds good, but there is a weight, price, size and power issue - it is also a very complex machine to be autonomous. We all know that faults with modern cars are 90% of the time sensor issues. Can Googlepod drive round issues or does failure mean pull over and you're stuck?

Can a machine be allowed to park itself with no occupants? That sounds like a whole new level.

We also know how wonderful maps are on sat navs - wonder how much confusion there would be when it's time to turn down that road that doesn't really exist or is a river? We've seen it a fair few times in the news where drivers have followed sat navs to the point of car destruction! Then there are diversion signs and road works..........

I think total driverless is along way off in the future. As the next version of adaptive cruise control, yes I can see it coming very soon to an S-Class near you!

[Usget]

Personally I think that the main value of driverless cars is not what happens when you're in them, but what happens when you're not.

Imagine driving to work, getting out, and then telling your car, "right, sod off and find a parking space with an electric charging point. Be good, and come back when I call you."

How much time would that save, especially in the inner city!

[V8 FOU]

Usget said:

Personally I think that the main value of driverless cars is not what happens when you're in them, but what happens when you're not.

Imagine driving to work, getting out, and then telling your car, "right, sod off and find a parking space with an electric charging point. Be good, and come back when I call you.

And bring back some food, wine and a pretty girl too."

Now, I am interested.......

[Usget]

Rumours that Google is testing an autonomous "wifing sack attachment" are totally unfounded

[SteveSteveson]

The Vambo said:

This thread reads like the madness the Georgians spouted about steam trains, it's like nobody has ever seen incremental improvement or noticed quite how good we are as a species at solving problems.

Yep. There is a lot of posts that sound like the complaints that you would die if you went over 40mph, or the fear that roads would be crippled because horses would be spooked at the mearest hint of a car. Lot's of the negative claims seem to come from people making assumptions about the technology that just are not true.

[otolith]

I think it's mostly people who don't want it to happen trying to think of reasons that it won't. The wish is father to the thought.

[zebedee]

SteveSteveson said:

e21Mark said:

Do you not think self-drive will incur costs?

I expect it will cost about the same as any other car.

surely with all the sensors and cameras and processing you are buying, which for serious cars would need to be monitoring tyre pressures, suspension and steering position, scanning the road ahead, to the side and behind), not to mention all the motors and controllers needed to do things, they will have to be more expensive?

Also, when these sensors fail, or processors, as they inevitably will, they will no doubt switch to limp mode or render the car undriveable. A taxi driver would still try to get you home if his taxi breaks down in the middle of fields on the way back from a pub, a driverless car with a drunk inside? No idea what would happen.

Edited by zebedee on Thursday 14th July 14:13

[otolith]

zebedee said:

surely with all the sensors and cameras and processing you are buying, which for serious cars would need to be monitoring tyre pressures, suspension and steering position, scanning the road ahead, to the side and behind), not to mention all the motors and controllers needed to do things, they will have to be more expensive?

I wouldn't have thought so. If it has electric power steering, the car can steer. If it has ABS, it can operate the brakes. If it has a fly by wire throttle, it can operate that. Adding options to new cars which require the same sorts of sensors that autonomy would require usually costs a few hundred quid. On the cost of a car, I don't think it would be a massive overhead.

zebedee said:

Also, when these sensors fail, or processors, as they inevitably will, they will no doubt switch to limp mode or render the car undriveable. A taxi driver would still try to get you home if his taxi breaks down in the middle of fields on the way back from a pub, a driverless car with a drunk inside? No idea what would happen.

The car will send your location, destination and diagnostic information directly to the AA?

Failing that, you will call the AA?

This does not sound like an insurmountable problem to me.

[e21Mark]

SteveSteveson said:

e21Mark said:

Do you not think self-drive will incur costs?

I expect it will cost about the same as any other car.

e21Mark said:

I imagine it'll be the slowest vehicle out there if it's adhering to speed limits?

Most people adhear to speed limits most of the time in my exprince. Many drive well below them. A self driving car should be able to travel at the speed limit far more often than most drivers.

What makes you think that re costs?

Drove from Cornwall to London today via M5/M4 and very few people were doing 70, let alone under 70. Unsure where you live but I see the majority of folk driving at the limit for most of the time.

[RobDickinson]

AJXX1 said:

Why would the AI be in the wrong lane in the first place? Not very intelligent if it's sat clogging up L2/L3 is it?

This. A proper level 4 AI self driving car isnt going to be doing stupid things like this anyhow.

Level 3 though might if the cretin behind the wheel tells it to.

[The Vambo]

Elon Musk said:

Working on using existing Tesla radar by itself (decoupled from camera) w temporal smoothing to create a coarse point cloud, like lidar. Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust

Yeah, so all a hacker would have to do is create a complex system to fire thousands of 3mm pieces of aluminium in front of a Tesla to confuse the radar, good one Elon

Edited by The Vambo on Friday 15th July 08:48