Ford and Google Move Forward Together Towards Consumer Self-Driving Cars
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I have a suspicion we will see some amazing demos of self driving cars in the snow and rain, once they are good at it. It's brought up every time we talk about being these cars to consumers, if Google or whoever have truly mastered these situations I think they would like people to know.
Still lots of work to do though!
They are already legal and they are coming, this isn't a far out concept. Semi self driving (requiring a driver to take over if needed) consumer cars probably will be first then fully automated ones a few years later.
The Google car also does not drive in snow AFAIK. Maybe that's bad for you but it's not a deal breaker for the first deployment of self driving cars as there are plenty of places where it never snows.
Should be interesting to see how it handles detours and temporary road re-routes. How would a self-driving car handle a two-lane two-way double-yellow-line road with one lane closed and a flagger alternating both directions of traffic through the same lane?
As far as driving some inaccessible location, I'd guess the cars would be more or less like personal trams. Just people who take public transit now, if you needed to go down a dirt road, you'd walk or take a folding bicycle.
Not sure if it's possible to do that easily, but it might be.
How real-time is their HD satellite imagery?
Cheap, easy to plonk down in the middle of a lane as you're pouring asphalt, if there's a pattern it's relatively hard to confuse with debris.
[1] http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous-cars/311...
Chrysler's head of engineering once said "We will have steer by wire and brake by wire over my dead body".
I don't think any major automaker has an in house effort anywhere close to Google. Most of them rely on suppliers like Bosch for their driverless car tech.
I think this shows that Ford is the only automaker that currently understands the shifts that the industry is about to undergo. None of the automakers or their suppliers can act like a software company in comparison to Google.
I don't think it's the tech (as such) that matters so much. I think the attitude, approach, and discussion matter much more.
For instance: Google has said, for now, we can't have drivers in the loop and call it a self-driving car (see Tesla etc videos[1]). That makes a lot of sense, but its also very limiting.
Airbus et al have not figured this one out (Air France 447[2]) - Perhaps automotive scale will provide more effective tools for managing attention and skill.
There are so many difficult non-technical discussions to overcome in this market - liability, user tracking (location history and habits), information leakage, failure modes (should I honk and flash lights if my human doesn't take control), aggressiveness settings (if the car is not going fast enough, the user will take control back), and many more, I'm sure.
Technical issues are going to be easy compared to the human issues. I think Google is addressing this by having an explicitly limited approach for now.
1. http://www.cnet.com/news/this-is-the-stupidest-misuse-of-tes...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 - Junior pilot did not understand that he was in a stall, possibly due to very low actual controlled flying time.
- Liability: the CEO of Volvo says that the manufacturer is liable if the vehicle crashes in autonomous mode. That's probably the way this will work out. That's a good thing; it means the manufacturer has every incentive to avoid crashes. Manufacturers will insure against this and build that into the price.
- User tracking: OnStar has that now. The next question is whether Big Google will permit you to opt out. Urmson, Google's head of automatic driving, says they don't need car to car communication. It's better to use sensor data. Lots of things on the road won't be equipped to talk, anyway.
- Information leakage: what's the question? Security, or privacy?
- Failure modes: there needs to be enough backup capability to get the vehicle stopped without a collision after any single component failure, and enough fault detection to detect any single component failure. It's probably sufficient to have two forward-facing radars with a backup computer monitoring the second one, dual actuators for steering and brakes, and backup throttle cutoff. The other side of failure is driving into a situation that the system can't handle. But that's usually a problem that appears slowly, as with heavy rain or fog, rather than all at once.
- Aggressiveness settings: this hasn't been a big problem for Google, other than having to edge into intersections in some situations. Self-driving cars have an edge in that they can look in all directions simultaneously, which means they can merge more precisely instead of more aggressively.
I was listening to a radio program (KQED's Forum [1]) where they discussed the California DMV's new proposed regulations for self-driving cars, and from the point of view of someone who isn't insanely arrogant about humans' ability to safely operate cars, they seem quite draconian and luddite-ish. Google made a statement about these proposed regulations that echoed my feelings, but Audi was on the program defending the regulations and claiming anything approaching fully autonomous driving was a couple of decades away. This seems to indicate that they are at least a decade behind Google who claim they're already there or will be within ~5 years, so it sort of blows my mind that they wouldn't be trying hard to partner with them or another firm (perhaps Uber?) that actually understands software (and particularly AI).
They might have more know-how than you realize. When you're writing safety-critical software, things like "dynamic memory allocation" and "local variables" become dangerous due to the risk of memory leaks and stack overflows.
Google will be the first but I expect many to follow suit. Maybe if Google pulls another Android move and open-sources the driving tech, they could possibly gain 90% of the market share by making it less interesting to develop competing technologies.
But look at other AI fields - speech recognition, image recognition, natural language processing - they are in the open and all improvements quickly circulate.
I think, to a much greater extent than problems like computer vision or NLP, many of the breakthroughs and much of the difficulty in making self-driving cars work are all about painstaking engineering efforts to ensure that every base is covered than breakthroughs in AI, making it difficult for me to imagine how the knowledge could be shared short of, as you mentioned, an Android-like move where someone decides to open source essentially the entire project. Seems unlikely to me in this case, but you never know.
It performs actions for expected information gain. Driving slower to see more.
There are so many sides to this story though. I won't trust a car from Google if they don't publish their research.
Its quite odd to read that. A LOT of people drive cars they hate, in traffic they hate, and would much rather hand over control.
California does have experience in this area. Caltrans had automatic driving demos in 1997, when Yang and Brin were still students at Stanford.[1]
As I've pointed out previously, NHTSA Level 2 systems are not good enough for hands-off driving, but, because they can handle simple situations like normal freeway driving, create the illusion that they are. This is the "deadly valley". Drivers are just not going to be paying close attention with the system engaged. It takes several seconds for a driver to detect trouble and take over, by which time it may be too late.
NHTSA Level 3 systems (roughly what Google has driving around Mountain View) have real situational awareness and a good driving record. What Google has now should be viewed as a floor for automatic driving competence. Anything less than that, and the system has to make sure the driver's hands are on the wheel.
On the liability front, Volvo's CEO says that the manufacturer must accept liability for accidents when driving automatically. That's probably the way this is going to go. Tesla would like to off-load that liability onto the driver, but that probably isn't the way this is going to go. The first self-driving cars will probably be leased on operating leases, so that insurance, maintenance, and vehicle cost are bundled together.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9G6JRUmg_A [2] http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a27060/model-s-owner...
It's miles from full autonomy, of course, but for what it does it works quite well in my experience driving between Seattle and Whistler, BC in snow, rain, and heavy wind twice in the last month (I only received the autopilot update a few weeks ago). It has clear limits and it's quite aware of them in general, protectively requiring drivers to take over before it runs up against them.
Damn!
Similiar to Tesla, Apple and Google are quite far away from the degree of industrialisiation the automotive industrie has today. Without this you can't build millions of cars cost effectivly. Also, cars are immensely complex in all the small things that need to be engineered deligently. So, that move makes greatest sense.