I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India.
Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.
Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.
Just to get our car out of the garage, I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road.
Also: bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws(in human pulled, CNG and electric varieties!)and pedestrians mixed in traffic everywhere.
This is a very practical test case for a car on a road. Not just in India but anywhere in the world.
Instead of N vegetable vendors you could have N traffic cops. How do you manage the human interaction part in the self driving car?
Not to take away from anyone's work in this area, but I have no idea how long it'll take to go from "works in America" to "works in India". In many countries the safest option (to evade disaster) can occasionally be "floor it and break the speed limit" to get away from x dangerous thing. I'm not sure if that's something that Google is willing to write into an AI.
bike < car < van < truck
which makes sense because if you're the one who's going to come off worse in an impact then you really want to give way - especially if you have a massive painted tipper truck hurtling towards you!
It will be very interesting to see how self driving systems can cope with these local unwritten bylaws.
This is why self driving AI will require Hard AI.
India is a perfect test bed for these people to test their algorithms. And for heaven's sake why would you test it in some place like the US. Cars in US are pretty much trains on road any way.
But even in those cases it makes sense to test in India. Why? Sooner or later you will have some situation in the US which may resemble daily traffic conditions in India. Imagine a law and order situation where people are running around without regards to traffic laws. Or some other situation where traffic is being rerouted through a wrong way, In US may be as an exception traffic is being routed through the left lane(being a right lane drive country) etc etc.
For all these situations you will very soon need a test environment that provides you with all situations to test.
Which won't be India.
Because you obviously don't want to be testing unprecedented conditions with live subjects in actual traffic.
If anything, that will only happen after tons of simulations of such conditions in fake environments.
That doesn't make much sense, because the main (and most common) question would still be between vehicles of the same class: car vs car, and this doesn't solve it.