Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tocomment | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

tocomment

Does anyone know how a self driving car would potentially handle scenarios like:

1. A traffic light being out and cop is directing traffic? (Would it have to learn hand gestures?)

2. Stopping at a guard booth.

3. Crossing a solid yellow line to pass a stopped car or a garbage truck?

View on HN

Perhaps in the future a group of people will have the job of moving cars that have gone into failsafe mode, and no one else will have to drive.

Take the case of elevators, originally they had manual operators who needed to make sure that they leveled out on a given floor so people could safely get on and off. Today elevators function on their own with users simply requesting their desired location. Every now and then they do get stuck, which requires calling in a certified technician to move the elevator, help trapped passengers, diagnose and repair problems before returning the elevator to service.

A well designed control system will have a good fail safe, but having to wait two hours for the closest technician to arrive because a branch has fallen accross the road would be annoying.

The last time I read the legislation (sorry, didn't have the time now), it still requires a licensed driver to be at the wheel and at the ready to take over. I presume this sort of intermediate step will help the developers gradually transition to these type of exceptional real-world scenarios.

Also, autonomous cars will eventually obviate the need for a traffic cop in the aforementioned scenario.

Or indeed the traffic light itself.

I wonder how it handles merging in tight traffic, such as when the current lane is closed ahead and you need to merge into the other lane. If the car doesn't have rerouting information in its database, does it go all the way up to the "closed ahead" sign blocking the road before it considers switching lanes?

Or when coming onto something like a highway where traffic has slowed down to a crawl. Normally you have to be a bit pushy and squeeze into the traffic, otherwise drivers in the other lane will never yield. Will the self-driving car know to do this, or will it wait forever for an opening in the traffic?

Long term I think self driving cars fix the traffic light problem without a cop. All the cars can just work it out over a network and go like it's a stop sign or just continue as if the light is there (if the city is on-board).

Or the trolley problem:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/06/the...

Looks like you are forgetting manual override.

Google employees pay attention to the road as the cars drive because that's their job. Consumers will read the paper and go to sleep while the cars drive. Manual override is not a solution to this problem. A panic mode that alerts the driver to take over in uncertain situations could help.

The cars will be programmed to always ensure that there is enough room to stop the car safely when something unexpected happens. BMW already has a system to automatically stop the vehicle safely if the driver is suddenly incapacitated. And Volvo has one that stops you rear-ending someone. Pretty soon we'll have cars that are pretty tough to crash, even though the human will still drive it almost 100% of the time.

That will be amazing, I can't wait!

Which is precisely why the 'hey we won't need insurance' call is completely wrong.

As long as people can override the function, people will make mistakes and cause damage. And this will always be the case, nobody wants to be stuck on an isolated road, unable to proceed because their lane is partially blocked, but it is safe to cross the lane and proceed.

Maybe the cop could have a device that lets the cars know when it's ok to turn or continue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com