Google Driverless Car – The Obstacle Detection Unit

Same reason I don't work in IT at SpaceX. I wouldn't have a wife anymore.

That looks very good. There are a lot of uses for SLAM and I hope the technology gets out of the labs soon. (My uses would be man portable indoor mapping of very complex structures with relatively good accuracy.)

Do the challenges compare at all to what we've seen in solid state gyroscopes / accelerometers getting massively cheaper?

I think SAR = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate

Which three? I only see SAR and INS, which I also don't know.

SAR -> Synthetic Aperture Radar INS -> Inertial Navigation System RF -> Radio Frequency

Yes, I should have spelled out the first two. The third I do expect most people here to know, given the context of the thread.

> Do you think that most of the people that are browsing over and reading these comments are knowledgeable enough in your niche field to know all those acronyms?

RF and sensors may be a portion of electrical engineering that is rarely discussed here, but it is hardly "niche".

I made a quick post where I should have made a more detailed one. Mea culpa.

Car ownership on itself may have some benefits but most of the people who own car is not by choice. US cities are planned around cars. Walking and Biking are not only out of option for many, they are actually unsafe once you leave the neighborhood streets.

> But just as Zipcars have presumably eliminated some car ownership use cases at the margins, fully autonomous cars would have a significant effect.

The big big thing I see about driverless cars is:

a) You can use it on-demand, even more easily than Zipcars. No need to physically be located near a lot, I can "hail" a driverless car and have it waiting for me when I need it. Smart routing and allocation can ensure that capacity is used smartly - it could drop somebody off while picking me up.

b) People who can't or won't drive can benefit from this. From young children to the elderly, transportation becomes much much easier. Have to take your kid to an appointment in the middle of the day? A driverless car can pick them up from school and bring them directly to the appointment and you can meet them there. You go to the appointment together, then driverless cars can take each of you back to your daily work, saving time all-around.

Yes - it's useful to have a car to keep stuff in. I can imagine you could keep one "on call" for a day out, and you can meet the car (at whatever exit is closest to you!) throughout the day to get supplies or drop things off.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic about what driverless cars can give us. Realistically I think hands-off driverless cars are within the next few years, but FUD and lawsuits will prevent more radical forward progress. It's certainly not unimaginable that it will take an entire generation of people to die off before truly autonomous cars are common and accepted.

> There are a lot of benefits in owning a car that you can keep "stuff" in.

So, combine driverless cars with depots with loading/unloading robots, then you can leave stuff in your driverless car, and have access to it with the next driverless pickup.

What's to stop someone from doing those things on cars now?

The most likely novel vulnerabilities with these will be in the way they network with one another and municipalities. Also, doubtless people will try to carjack them or steal the hubcaps and stuff.

we have pretty high retina resolution. To feel the limits of our stereo machinery, look at any monotone surface with monotone lightning at the distance that you can' distinguish any local mini-features of the surface - looking at the smooth ceiling of something like this - and you can feel how your eyes strain trying to find (and can't) the correct focus distance to distinguish the features and thus to get stereo working by matching the features from the left and right channels. The same feeling can be felt when you look at say vertical bar patterned surface so that eyes/brain have harder time to match specific bars from left and right eye. In both cases the surface should be large enough to cover the focus spot in your vision space, so that eyes/brain couldn't get help from relative position of the surface vs. other objects.

Those are actually the same issues one encounters when develops computer stereo :) The modern cameras got to the retina resolution and computer power today is able to do stereo match on those resolutions - this is why we started to get meaningful results. The computer stereo will surpass human's because cameras can have higher resolution, higher sensitivity and they can see in different wavelengths in addition to visual. Plus you can "paint" the objects ahead of you with IR for example, so the stereo match would be even easier.

In addition to trhway's answer, I'd say we use a lot of assumptions about the world : houses usually have flat, orthogonal walls, streets are flat, etc.. Of course, we can have the computer learn those assumption, but it's more complicated than pure dense stereo.

But recalls happen already, for all sorts of reasons. They're expensive, and they can have a big impact on a manufacturer's reputation, but they don't mean that nobody can sell a car in the first place.

That's interesting. A computer hits a pedestrian, then presumably the algorithms are updated and the probability of that scenario playing out again drops to 0. While A human hits a pedestrian, and that scenario is likely to never occur for that driver again, but for all other drivers the probability remains the same.

Unless there are no real cars, just a device pretending to be many. Maybe we need a proof-of-car-presence :)

I think that the way you handle malicious actors now is that people know that they have a laser in their eyes. This would be more like "what if someone could just make another car or obstacle invisible to you, and you have no way of knowing it."

I agree it is a very rare event, and will always continue to be. But it would need to be handled, and handled in ways other than, "Hi, here's a 100 car pile-up."

Similarly, and probably less rarely, you'd need to handle scenarios in which another actor wasn't malicious per se, but faulty to a degree that it was functionally malicious. Of course, we've always had to handle the idea that somebody might be driving a car with bad brakes, and that's dangerous enough, but before now a car with bad brakes wouldn't also make the brakes bad for ten cars around them. I think that's worthy of some contemplation.