Who thought making decent autonomous cars was going to take as long as 2020? I mean for regulations etc maybe, but not for the tech. Earlier this year I expected it to be done later this year.
Edited for clarity (I hope).
Edited for clarity (I hope).
Right now I'm in the mountains. Narrow, icy roads. Thick snow fall, making some of the sensors already available unreliable.
The Google approach is to map everything before hand, and mostly easy conditions. Tesla somewhat more general, but still not too difficult roads. Volvo has been the only one I've seen with something that might tackle these issues.
As a case in point, while voice recognition has indeed gotten quite good with the right kind of microphones (e.g. Amazon Echo), the natural language processing and other "smarts" to use that as a basis for even a subpar by human admin standards digital assistant seems to still be reasonably far away. And that doesn't even require interfacing with the physical world.
Hard problems are rarely just one hard problem, but until you solve the first hard sub-problem you won't even know what the other hard sub-problems are, let alone what proportion of difficulty each contributes.
It's like climbing a mountain in the fog: you've found the way forward and if it holds out you can extrapolate when you will reach the top, only to find you dead end at the face of a sheer cliff...it will be awhile before you find the next way forward.
It's progress but the destination remains further than it seems.
Control: when to yield, without watching the face of the other driver, etc.
Edge cases: obeying a police officer, yielding to an ambulance, cooperating with other cars.
On their todo list was identifying kinda of cars (like a police car), kinds of trucks (school bus and ambulance), and acting appropriately.
I've seen google mention responding to hand gestures from bicyclist. But also being exceedingly polite and repeatedly stopping as a track standing bicyclist rides slightly backwards and forwards.
Liability: who is liable when the car kills a pedestrian?
Driver engagement: How do you safely transition from automatic control to manual control.
Maintenance: Will the manufacturer be obligated to provide software updates for the life of the vehicle? Even if that vehicle is 20 years old? Even if newer software is 10x less likely to kill a pedestrian?
Cost: Are the costs one-time or will there be a maintenance fee?
Licensing: Does the manufacture have the right to disable functionality after the purchase? Do they have a right to your data? Can they sell that to your insurer?
Regulation: Who certifies systems? How do they test them? When is a system "good enough?"
All of these things sound trivial compared to the technical challenges but it's these kinds of non-technical challenges that killed the small-airplane market in the US and are still unresolved 65 years later.
They seem big enough to incentivize mapping costs.
Detailed and current mapping will likely be a necessary part of fully-autonomous systems at least initially. But there's nothing especially difficult about doing that mapping. It's just a question of economics.