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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

Google's system is not yet arbitrary. They prerun the roads the system drives on.

I'm excited to see more "in the wild" units - more competition and innovation is always a good thing.

This quote from a long New York Times article on Google is highly relevant:

"The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-...

So Google self driving cars run in a virtual environment prebuilt for them by their street view cars being manually driven, with sensor input to fill in the realtime data variables (people, other cars, traffic light state). Brilliant!

I don't see "Google needs to pre-map the route" as a hurdle at all. Even if Google had never been in my area, I would not mind one bit having to do my daily commute manually for a week while the car builds more and more detailed maps of the route, if it saved me the hassle of the commute for months thereafter.

Plus, every time the automatic car goes over the road, it's presumably checking its prior maps and flagging any anomalies from its preset mission. It still needs to recognize a new stop sign, but if a stop sign disappears, it will stop anyway while waiting for an answer on "was it was taken out on purpose, or did some kids steal it?".

This is the basis of the SLAM algorithms (SLAM = simultaneous localization and mapping). As you say, if we all had these cars, we'd quickly know about changes. Of course, the hard problem is finding the new lights, but if this was to become mainstream I think a lot of things would change. For example, if a town decides to install a red light, they don't just install one, they register it in a national database.

If the car could map the route automatically, then it wouldn't need the pre-map in the first place. The problem is that creating the map routes currently requires expert human attention. Driving your daily commute manually for a week won't do any good.

Yes, it is clear that the Google system needs quite a lot of data about the roads it is driving on. But given those roads with a high amount of detail, the Google system can (from my understanding) support keying in an arbitrary destination.

I may be reading too much into this, but when I read "test route" in the article, it gave me the impression that the Volvo approach is sort of like a train without the tracks -- only able to follow a pre-programmed route from point A to point B.

No, they picked a test route to be decently representative and allow them to setup their tests correctly. It is not an A to B thing. role_v's comment is a pretty good explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495

The quote ghaff posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698610 it seems like you are describing Google more than Volvo.

> role_v's comment is a pretty good explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495

That's not an explanation, it's speculation just like my speculation is.

http://www.volvocars.com/intl/top/corporate/news/pages/defau...

note the:

Our aim is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe ‘harbour’ if the driver for any reason is unable to regain control,” explains Erik Coelingh, Technical Specialist at Volvo Car Group.

Plus the goals listed.

Volvo did do a land-train style project called SARTRE http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072088_sartre-self-drivi...

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