Are there technologies that integrate with some kind of existing infrastructure like beacons, etc. that would just tell the car where the streets are? If not, why not?
That's why I specified "in large metropolitan areas". I can see that it's impractical to outfit anything outside dense cities with such beacons, but inside the city they could augment, if not replace autonomous driving systems. Or so I imagine.
> GPS, A-GPS, and RTK
Thanks for telling me about RTK, I did not know about this!
Maybe if we were immediately jumping to 50% self-driving adoption it would be easier to make smart roads, but that's not the world we're living in yet.
It cleverly got around our allergy to spending on infrastructure by being cold-war-era military technology.
Yeah, but it doesn't say where the streets are, or where the traffic lights are, or (officially) what's the speed limit on this stretch of road, etc. All those are via the layer that's applied by a private company, and may differ substantially from how the city itself intends to direct traffic.
I used to work for TomTom and at the time they were just getting into the self-driving cars sector. I don't know where they are with it now, but four years ago they were already building high-definition 3D maps for autonomous cars. And they had road sign reading technology.
You can see their HD 3D map in a video [1] where they also explain how it's constructed using their mapping vehicles.
EDIT: To make my point clear, we don't really need to invest in smart roads - the cars and the supporting tech are already smart enough.
There are a few reasons I can think of. 1) latency - the same argument against data center approach 2) security - we can't trust other computers as once a hardware is owned by somewhere the security battle is lost 3) unnecessary and insufficient - there are human drivers and there are cases when there is no other self-driving car around.