Hacker News Reader

Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

How did they tell the car to stop in front of the speaker (in the drive thru)? And how did they signal to the car that they were done ordering and to go to the pick-up window? The video conveniently skips those sequences.

View on HN

"a drive on a carefully programmed route" - given careful enough programming, this appears to allow for an indefinite amount of smoke and mirrors specific to this demo.

To be fair, it would be easily worth it for a blind person to spend a few hours carefully programming important routes like this. And of course, when self-driving cars are widely adopted, Taco Bell will automatically make instructions available. (This could be as simple as a standardized sign denoting the entrance and two windows of a drive through.)

> This could be as simple as a standardized sign denoting the entrance and two windows of a drive through.

3/4 of McDonalds and other restaurants I go through already have signage, road markings, etc. for the drive through. Even some of the McDonalds I've been through have signs in the windows saying "Window 1" and "Window 2" (why this is necessary for humans of an age and intellect capable of driving a car, but apparently the ability to count windows does not have an impact on motor vehicular ability).

It really wouldn't be much difficulty for the companies to standardize these signs as most already use their own anyway.

I can't tell you how many times I've been told to "drive to the first window" only to sit there for a couple of minutes before realizing they meant the second window I encounter. It may seem stupid... But better safe than annoyed, I suppose.

I just hate the "drive up and we'll bring it to you" bit.

The other option is a 2-d barcode on the road or on a sign in a position that the car can read it. That barcode leads to a URL with a machine-readable map of the drive-thru. Naturally such a sign and URL is maintained by the restaurant and the car's systems can read and understand the content.

Awesome, if you ask me.

This was discussed in a past patent mentioned on HN.

Good idea, but probably can't be relied upon given liability issues (in addition to the whole "print wrong barcode and sabotage restaurant with crashing cars thing).

I doubt a malicious map would be allowed to override the car's basic collision avoidance, however it would be a serious nuisance.

"paste a wrong barcode over the restaurant's one in the middle of the night & redirect cars to the competitor just down the road", then? :P

To sound like a researcher: "those are just implementation details".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com