> In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point.
That's similar to what I've wondered about as a good intermediate step between what we have now and fully autonomous self-driving cars that can go from any given place to any given destination given the address, even if they have never been there before.
The idea is that most of us have various trips that we make frequently, such as to/from work, to/from a grocery store, to/from kid's school, etc., and maybe we could simplify the early consumer self-driving systems by limiting them to such trips. Here's how I imagine it would work.
When you decide you want to add a route to your car's self-drivable routes, such as your commute to work, you put the car in an observer mode and drive the route manually. The car tries to identify traffic signs, traffic lights, lane markers, and other such things that it needs to understand. The car also records video of the drive.
When you tell the car you've reached the destination, it uploads the video of the drive to the vendor that provided your self-driving system. It also uploads what traffic signs, lights, etc., it has identified, and a log of your control inputs.
The vendor has a human watch the video of your drive, review the things that the car identified, and identify things that the car missed that are relevant. The human accesses whether or not the car can handle this route as is, or can handle it if some special cases are added, or cannot handle it. In the first two cases, the vendor notifies the car that it is now allowed to drive the route (and downloads any extra information they identified that the car needs), and the car can then drive the route in self-driving mode.
Whenever the car drives the route in self-driving mode, it compares what it sees and identifies (traffic signs, lane markings, etc.) with those that were used when it was shown the route. If there are more than trivial changes, it asks the passenger to take over driving, and uploads a report to the vendor for review.
Perhaps it also uploads video of the route every time it is driven, and the vendor runs software that automatically compares each to prior videos of that route, and learns what features normally vary over time, and which are more constant. The results can be sent back to the car to adjust its thresholds on a feature by feature basis for when it considers something changed enough to require human intervention.