RE: Auto-Pilot Audi TT Climbs Pikes Peak

[TheOrangePeril]

Fantastic! As an avid follower of the Darpa challenges (and as a Robotics student!) I think this is brilliant.

I can't wait until all the idiots who openly confess to being bad drivers (but that drive anyway) go the fully automated route and gets themselves off of our highways (I have a friend who, despite claiming she's unsafe in a car and hates driving, always takes the car over the train or walking).

One step closer to safer roads.

[Tuna]

Given the numpties driving the school run each morning, half asleep and still with a bowl of cereal in their lap, this could be a good thing. The first thing we're likely to see is more sophisticated adaptive safety systems in cars (braking, avoiding pedestrians, preventing tailgating etc.). Then cars will be certified for use on 'controlled roads' - motorways and the like. Then for all road networks.

As for the BigTrak references, try programming BigTrak to do a 3 metre square and return to it's initial position. See how far off it is, and multiply that by the length of Pikes Peak. Add in loose road surfaces and inevitable drive line inaccuracies and you can easily figure out that this is no pre-programmed run.

GPS doesn't help much either, as it's only loosely accurate and somewhat laggy when you're driving at 50mph+. The cars are using some pretty funky tech to see their environment and react to it.

It's true that such systems will never be 100% safe, but actually the safety record of human drivers is not so good. There will be a point where switching over to autonomous cars will reduce the number of road deaths, whilst improving network efficiency (ie. less congestion due to bunching and idiot manoeuvres). At that point, what is your justification for insisting on driving yourself to work in the morning?

Edited by Tuna on Monday 22 November 12:10

[mikea4tdi]

Looks impressive to me, references to big track are insulting to the tech in this car.
As others have said you coudlnt' do this through pre programming.
As to whats the point, I helped develop some of the lane guidance systems in 2000, using video to identify road boundaries and some trick algorithms to work out position attitute and curvature. This gave the car the ability to drive down the road by its self as long as it could pick out a lane edge. Added to that autonomous cruise control with radar it was pretty impressive.
Due to legislation etc we down graded the system to lane guide thats if you slowly veir out of lane without using your indicators it would nudge you back in again.
Next step was to integrate gps and using datastream feeds from other cars ahead, this was nearlly 10 years ago so not sure what they are using now.

[sprinter1050]

TheOrangePeril said:

Fantastic! As an avid follower of the Darpa challenges (and as a Robotics student!) I think this is brilliant.

I can't wait until all the idiots who openly confess to being bad drivers (but that drive anyway) go the fully automated route and gets themselves off of our highways (I have a friend who, despite claiming she's unsafe in a car and hates driving, always takes the car over the train or walking).

One step closer to safer roads.

Or enable the compulsory conversion of cars to "robotic" operation for drivers with "certain" tendencies or bad driving habits- for life ?. ( except a bit of speed of course )

[anonymous-user]

I suspect that the biggest "hurdle" with all this autonomous technology will, as always, be the human element. Any of these cars will have to be able to "update" their systems with the latest data etc, so they will have to be internet connected, which means they can get a virus / be hacked. Right now, if your PC gets a virus, for 99.99999% of people, it's bloody annoying, but not exactly life threatening. But if your car gets hacked????


(there was a recent paper published where some uni people in the US easily "cracked" a cars ems and ABS, even adding some of there own code to the ABS unit, that once the car exceeded 60mph, it just locked a front n/s brake on fully, caused the car to crash, then the code deleted itself from the ROM......... Currently, you would need to break into a car and upload that virus via the OBD connector, but once we have internet access in our cars, who knows what will be waiting for you on the morning commute!!)

[ridds]

mikea4tdi said:

Looks impressive to me, references to big track are insulting to the tech in this car.
As others have said you coudlnt' do this through pre programming.
As to whats the point, I helped develop some of the lane guidance systems in 2000, using video to identify road boundaries and some trick algorithms to work out position attitute and curvature. This gave the car the ability to drive down the road by its self as long as it could pick out a lane edge. Added to that autonomous cruise control with radar it was pretty impressive.
Due to legislation etc we down graded the system to lane guide thats if you slowly veir out of lane without using your indicators it would nudge you back in again.
Next step was to integrate gps and using datastream feeds from other cars ahead, this was nearlly 10 years ago so not sure what they are using now.

I don't think it's anywhere near as advanced as it's making out to be. It hasn't got any fancy kit on it like the DARPA cars have. To me it purely looks like a predetermined route plotted in and then the kit interfaced with the cars controls.

Watching the steering it doesn't make any of the inputs as if it was "finding" it's way. I more suspect the route was driven a number of times by a human pilot, course plotted and then it trundled off up the hill using GPS assistance.

[JonRB]

Max_Torque said:

then the code deleted itself from the ROM.

The code deleted itself from Read-Only Memory? That's pretty impressive.

[dvance]

dxg said:

g4ry13 said:

Is the car pre-programmed with the track or is it actually reading the road and adapting?

It has a map and is trying to navigate it, but it's sensing its surroundings.

There are videos (I will have to hunt them down at home) of what the Passat "sees" when it's navigating traffic and it's astounding. LIDOR information overlaid with its sense of where it is in the map, then overlaid with obstacles it was not expecting (cars, people, etc) but this final "layer" is an AI classification layer that's making sense of what it needs to react to. Truly astounding stuff!

+1
And there's also this:

http://www.techeye.net/science/vans-drive-themselv...

http://detnews.com/article/20101028/AUTO01/1028043...

Basically 4 vans driving themselves on a 8 000 mile journey with human supervision (and driving at times where the GPS data was non existent so they could not plot a route to follow, or the road signs were not readable by the vans due to differences in their appearance).

There's also this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY93kr8PaC4

which I would think is more consistent than any human driver, and would be quite well suited to avoiding dangerous situations due to water, oil spills etc.

So, yes, I love this bit of technology, of course, we should always be given to option to drive ourselves if we so desire

[dvance]

ridds said:

mikea4tdi said:

Looks impressive to me, references to big track are insulting to the tech in this car.
As others have said you coudlnt' do this through pre programming.
As to whats the point, I helped develop some of the lane guidance systems in 2000, using video to identify road boundaries and some trick algorithms to work out position attitute and curvature. This gave the car the ability to drive down the road by its self as long as it could pick out a lane edge. Added to that autonomous cruise control with radar it was pretty impressive.
Due to legislation etc we down graded the system to lane guide thats if you slowly veir out of lane without using your indicators it would nudge you back in again.
Next step was to integrate gps and using datastream feeds from other cars ahead, this was nearlly 10 years ago so not sure what they are using now.

I don't think it's anywhere near as advanced as it's making out to be. It hasn't got any fancy kit on it like the DARPA cars have. To me it purely looks like a predetermined route plotted in and then the kit interfaced with the cars controls.

Watching the steering it doesn't make any of the inputs as if it was "finding" it's way. I more suspect the route was driven a number of times by a human pilot, course plotted and then it trundled off up the hill using GPS assistance.

The value added to science for that would be zero, and I really think VAG would not pile money in such a project with no benefit whatsoever. Neither would Stanford put its name behind it So yeah, I think you're wrong on this one.

[TVRWannabee]

So, assuming these things did become standard, what's the life expectancy of the technology involved?

Having just had a breakdown because the crackshaft sensor was faulty, I am wondering how long before an entirely computer-driven second hand car's system fails in the same way and steers itself into the ditch while you are asleep?

Or will we have to buy a brand-new car every two years?

Edited by TVRWannabee on Monday 22 November 13:10

[jains15]

I love the idea of this and the tech is astounding, but imagine getting into your Alfa of a morning and seeing the "Driven by Microsoft" logo on the dash

[hairykrishna]

300bhp/ton said:

Greg_D said:

these things really are coming along now, aren't they. That's pretty cool

Greg

Maybe I'm dimissing the effort gone into this. But I'm honestly not all that impressed. Video games are and have been able for ages to be "programmed" to follow a route.

All this does is use a combo of a predifed route, map and some on board senser to help it detect where it is. All of which is current or old tech, nothing is really new here. For example planes and boats have had "auto pilot" modes for ages.

I also struggle to see the real world use of such a system, no road infrastructure exists to truly make use of such a system. Sure it's all fine working in controlled conditions with clear road edges or on a route such as this which has evidently had much pre-run effort involved in it. But out in the real world with unknowns and country lanes that have little or no defined road edges I think it's a different story.


Also, are car makers truly wanting to take responsability for any accidents that arise if such a system is used? The driver will no longer be a driver, so can't be at fault.

And accidents will happen, for proof just look at how many issues and errors SatNavs have, how many roads do they not know about, or want to take you the wrong way, or at the wrong speed.

You, and others, are missing how impressive it is, but through no fault of your own as this article is light on history. The pikes peak course is not the most impressive a demonstration of their tech which has evolved over a number of years from their 'DARPA grand challenge' and 'Urban challenge' entrants. This is just them pushing development to high speed driving and getting more publicity.

Give this system (or their previous system anyway) a GPS coordinate and it can drive there, obeying appropriate traffic laws and reacting to unexpected events and other cars. Its 'on board sensor' as you term it is actually a combination of laser ranging, LIDAR and video which it uses to create a 'map' of the surrounding area. It can follow a desert course will poorly defined edges to the road. It can drive in city traffic, obeying stop signs and lights. It's astonishing - really close to a sci fi 'self driving car'

There are a couple of good documentaries about it on google video if you have some time to kill.

[dvance]

TVRWannabee said:

So, assuming these things did become standard, what's the life expectancy of the technology involved?

Having just had a breakdown because the crackshaft sensor was faulty, I am wondering how long before a second hand car's system fails in the same way and steers itself into the ditch while you are asleep?

I would imagine if these things make it to wide commercial applications, you would have a redundancy system in place much like the one on space shuttles where you have three separate identical computer systems making a decision and then voting what to do. You could also have a mandatory stop once one system starts behaving erratically and request that the car is driven manually from there on. Of course, sensor failures would be the most difficult problem to get around, but with redundancies and cross checks between different sensor types it should be relatively easy to suss those out. Software would be extremely tricky to get right though.

[vintageracer01]

veejdub said:

pretty cool idea- takes the fun out of DRIVING though

If this catches on who will be the prospective PHers?
They won' t know what we are on about.

[Scoobman]

dave_s13 said:

Seriously, why?

What is the ultimate aim of developing what appears to be utterly useless technology.

You have hit the nail on the head. I will answer your question.

Now these are broad generalisations but very true.

This is a key reason why is the UK on its arse when it comes to manufacturing and much else.

It is why is Germany the most dominant country in Europe economicaly and from a manufacturing point of view.

It is things like this. The amount that is spent on R&D is staggering. Not just companies but government funded bodies. They are given millions with no goal - just invent stuff! Thats it just invent stuff!

It filters down and sideways and into dead ends.

But at the end of the day German companies are world leaders and UK and US companies are short sightly chasing the next quarters results to keep the share holders happy. I mean pah who needs R&D and to do pointless thing like drive Audis slow up mountains without drivers in.

[PaulMoor]

Scoobman said:

This is a key reason why is the UK on its arse when it comes to manufacturing and much else.

/headdesk.

[drybeer]

Artical said:

(cue bad pun about hairdresser TT drivers now being able to spend all their time looking in the mirror).

What pun? There is no pun.

Bad joke perhaps.

(Pedantic society of Scotland member)

[ridds]

dvance said:

ridds said:

mikea4tdi said:

Looks impressive to me, references to big track are insulting to the tech in this car.
As others have said you coudlnt' do this through pre programming.
As to whats the point, I helped develop some of the lane guidance systems in 2000, using video to identify road boundaries and some trick algorithms to work out position attitute and curvature. This gave the car the ability to drive down the road by its self as long as it could pick out a lane edge. Added to that autonomous cruise control with radar it was pretty impressive.
Due to legislation etc we down graded the system to lane guide thats if you slowly veir out of lane without using your indicators it would nudge you back in again.
Next step was to integrate gps and using datastream feeds from other cars ahead, this was nearlly 10 years ago so not sure what they are using now.

I don't think it's anywhere near as advanced as it's making out to be. It hasn't got any fancy kit on it like the DARPA cars have. To me it purely looks like a predetermined route plotted in and then the kit interfaced with the cars controls.

Watching the steering it doesn't make any of the inputs as if it was "finding" it's way. I more suspect the route was driven a number of times by a human pilot, course plotted and then it trundled off up the hill using GPS assistance.

The value added to science for that would be zero, and I really think VAG would not pile money in such a project with no benefit whatsoever. Neither would Stanford put its name behind it So yeah, I think you're wrong on this one.

Fair enough, they'll have to have done something magic to hide all the lasers/scanners etc. All the DARPA cars I have seen have been COVERED in kit and half the boot full of PCs, now I know tech moves on fast but to fit it all in the boot of a TT and have 4 aerials??

gizmag

And from here, quoting the builders of the car....

World car fans

Autonomous TTS designer Raul Cenan said:

Meanwhile a differential GPS system with a margin of error under two centimeters keeps the car on course.

[drpep]

I really don't know what all the fuss is about. Audi have been abstracting the driver from the driving experience in most of their cars for years (Quattro, RS4 and R8 excepted).

Not surprised by this at all. Audi: cars for drivers who don't want to drive. Just turn the key, and pose.

[EDLT]

TVRWannabee said:

Or will we have to buy a brand-new car every two years?

Two years?! This stuff will be going obsolete faster than mobile phones.