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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

What happens in the Utopian future of fully autonomous cars (level 5) which heavily rely on GPS for route mapping and positioning?

Isn't the dream to be able to sit in the back seat and read a book or take a nap? The human occupant might not be aware anything's wrong until the vehicle is running out of battery or gas, or gets stuck in the sand (from the parent's experience).

There's a pass through the mountains near me that gets shut down during the winter due to snow every year. I go up there usually but don't need to go all the way through - and was surprised this year to see an official CalTrans sign saying:

"Your GPS is lying to you! The pass is closed! Turn back!"

I suppose enough people every year ignore the road closure signs and continue all the way until they get stuck... how would an autonomous vehicle know any better either?

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Definitely this will be a failure case. Another failure will be "loops" where the car ends up driving the same few miles repeatedly - I've seen this failure mode in Google Maps as well. However, the navigator and the driver are separate components, so even if the navigator says to drive off the gaping hole in the bridge, the driver will hopefully recognize the fault and bring the car safely to a stop.

But definitely we will see the "German family dies in death valley due to navigator failure" headline.

If the argument is that it's OK because the driver will be there to stop the car from doing something fatally stupid, then that sort of defeats the purpose of not driving the car yourself; this isn't a "self-driving" car, it's glorified cruise control.

I think the parent was referring to the automated system driving the car as the “driver”, not a human.

Is there any way to report corrections to Google maps? On more than one occasion, I've had a route that called for a left turn at a traffic light, try to route me into a right turn and an immediate (illegal) u-turn. In another case, my route would have logically had me cross a road (again at a traffic light), however Google maps wanted me to turn either right or left, drive for a few miles, turn into a subdivision to turn around and retrace the route, and then finally continue on the original road. Not to mention that it always wants me to cut across my backyard to get to a road running behind my house, instead of backing out of my driveway onto the road I live on.

It isn't that I can't easily solve these problems if I'm looking at the map, but since it is incapable of having me make a left turn it will often plot an "optimal" route that is 15 minutes longer than it should be, because the real optimal route looks like it takes longer due to the routing error. Not to mention that it often confuses delivery drivers. Note, that the incorrect route typically comes from the Android version of Google maps, but if I go on the web interface the route will be ok.

> Is there any way to report corrections to Google maps?

Sell all your property, move to India and get a job on their equivalent version of Mechanical Turk.

Or you can install OsmAnd and use the OSM dataset, which is not as comprehensive, but it doesn't many lies. At most, outdated data.

If you ignore those damned TIGER imports, at least...

I had OSMAnd try to navigate me to a wrong-way street (taking the offramp rather than the onramp when trying to get on the freeway on a parclo. FWIW, the data was corrected before I could get to a computer though.

Yes (at least, on desktop there is). Right click on the map where you want to fix something and select "Report a data problem". The UI will walk you through the rest.

The Android app often asks me if there's a problem I'd like to report. This happens when I take a different route than the suggested one.

The desktop and iOS apps have feedback reporting which I've used for that before. I got an email from them noting that my correction had been accepted and within a week or so noticed far fewer people making an illegal left turn on a major road near us.

>But definitely we will see the "German family dies in death valley due to navigator failure" headline.

Not much different than today, then: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...

Google would be wise to do their due diligence with routing. They have street view, routes should be scouted and scoured for areas that might be tricky to negotiate for a self driving car. It would be worth it, I imagine after a while there won't be any majorly unique routes so the effort would scale down. Plus you'd have the best quality routing data on the market.

Really it needs to be crowd sourced, which they have in the form of Waze. Otherwise the data gets stale fast.

I would guess that a modern equivalent of that German family will have a mobile phone with them. And my instinct is that SDR makes it practical for phones to be able to become 406MHz COSPAS-SARSAT beacons when they need to not far in the future.

A 406MHz beacon is going to be relevant to a lot of scenarios that people get into in large sparsely populated countries like the US or Australia, because it means somebody knows where you are and that you need help, and then all they've got to do is come help you.

Simple, we only allow autonomous vehicles to have 40 inch tires, a winch, front and rear lockers, and giant battery. Good to go through Rubicon!

But seriously this is a pretty dangerous situation, especially in the snowy mountains. I remember reading an article about a Tesla engineer getting stuck on a trail in the Sierra's and his Jeep eventually being buried in 10+ ft of snow.

Edit: Found the article

https://jalopnik.com/a-tesla-engineers-jeep-ended-up-under-1...

Hopefully the state DOT will have a way of communicating with self driving vehicles directly without needing to go through a company like google first.

I think that largely depends on who's in power over the next decade or two.

A government agency with good technology? lol

> What happens in the Utopian future of fully autonomous cars (level 5) which heavily rely on GPS for route mapping and positioning?

Those won't use Google Maps.

The short story "Car Wars" digs at this kind of issue.

https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/car-wars

It is unlikely that fully autonomous cars will uese any GPS at all.

All evidence is that the market will be dominated almost entirely by Tesla. In April Tesla presented[1] their state of the art in autonomous car vehicle design.

Elon repeatedly emphasized that GPS was inadequate and systems relying on it will fail. The Tesla full self-driving computer, already currently installed in nearly all Tesla vehicles, does not use GPS data to compute the driving solution.

P.S: Keep in mind that GPS is a positioning system, not a navigation system. Navigation comes from the mapping data used by GPS devices, and as for that autonomous vehicles needn't rely on the low quality map data from Google Maps other any other provider. A massive fleet of Tesla vehicles are providing constant validation of navigable routes right now.

(edit: updated link time to a couple of particularly relevant questions and answers in the same video)

[1]: https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9526

They won’t use GPS to figure out which lane they’re in or to know how much to steer in order to take the next curve. They’ll still use GPS to determine which roads to take.

No they will not, or at least it won't be the primary source for positioning.

They will use mapping data, and that is not a problem because the mapping data they have comes from their fleet of cars on the road which upload that data daily.

If any car encounters an incorrectly mapped route all cars will know it. And I expect you will not be able to create an autonomous route that a Tesla car has not already successfully traveled.

The problem of reporting issues to Google Maps is removed.

I’m highly skeptical of this. Local info will probably be used to refine things, but GPS and maps are still going to be the primary inputs driving things like “which exit do I take?”

Since you mentioned Tesla’s current systems, note that this is how they work now. Lane keeping is entirely local, but decisions about which lane to be in or which exit to take to reach your destination are done with your GPS position.

All I can say is watch the presentation. These systems don't work the way many people seem think they do, they are much MUCH more robust.

The op's assertion that autonomous vehicles rely "heavily" on GPS data is false. The problem he presents will not occur.

This won't happen because the computer does not use GPS to determine drivability and will not drive the car into underivable conditions, and the computer will have selected a drivable route to begin with because it can select from routes that have previously been driven. If a route that was previously drivable becomes underivable due to local conditions, the car simply re-routes.

Neither the apparent drivability of mapping data, nor position within that data as computed by GPS effect the car's ability to travel autonomously from point A to point B.

Watch a Tesla using Navigate on Autopilot today and see how it decides which lane it needs to be in and which exit to take.

It's certainly not reading signs. The system doesn't currently have that capability. It's a combination of GPS (to know where it is) and maps (to know how to go from where it is to the destination).

I 100% agree with you that the problems presented in the original comment wouldn't be an issue. The cars will use local data to determine whether a surface is drivable. They won't drive into sand or deep snow just because the navigation says that they should.

But that's not the same as your statement that they won't use GPS at all. And your statement that Tesla currently doesn't use GPS in their systems is plainly wrong.

You really do need to watch the presentation I linked. They go into excruciating detail on what data is used and how it is used.

I did not say Tesla's don't use GPS, they do. I said "It is unlikely that fully autonomous cars will use any GPS at all". My argument is not that you can't get google maps in your car, my argument is that the autonomous cars of the "Utopian future" will not need google maps to function, much less leave you stranded in an incorrectly mapped location.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood. Does “driving solution“ only refer to immediate actions taken locally, like lane keeping and obstacle avoidance?

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