Korean Competition Shows Weather Still a Challenge for Autonomous Cars

Humans have a lot of shortcomings--emotions, sleepiness, distraction, the effects of drugs and alcohol--but humans have some amazing strengths too. We've got cognitive abilities in recognizing patterns and making decisions that were honed by millions of years of evolution, and directly trained by, on average, decades of actually driving cars. I think it's easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths.

We barely have fully-autonomous self-flying planes today, and I don't know of any research showing that they are safer than human-piloted planes. And flying is a far less complicated domain to automate than driving.

A self driving car wouldn't have to work very hard here to do better than me.

* Check for weather conditions at altitude (not just start and destination points).

* Refuse to leave the house using that route if weather conditions are bad.

Oh well, lesson learned. On that topic does anyone know of maps software that does that for you -- i.e. check weather not just traffic?

In the test case, if the car recognized "oh this is the course from yesterday, even though it doesn't quite look like it, its in the same GPS coordinates" and then try to match larger easier to spot landmarks with its previous experience. That would certainly help it out.

his thesis was awesome though, he created shadow and rain drop removal while also mitigating the effects of 'smeared headlights' from a wet road at night

Winter snow removal equipment scrapes the lines off the roads requiring re-application every summer in my area, and a common sight in the cities is the "re-positioning" of lanes during the winter. Drivers carve out their own lanes in the snow, so a 4 lane road might have only 3 lanes in the winter. I find this challenging to negotiate in the winter as no one seems sure whether they should follow the carved out path or be in the actual lane, assuming they know where it is under the packed snow. How could a self-driving car deal with that?

Not to mention inconsistent, icy road surfaces with unpredictable traction and the springtime muck of snow/gravel/salt that makes keeping the windshield clean, much less exterior sensors and cameras.

While I recognize the amount of work and smarts that has gone into self driving cars it is my humble opinion that the typical approach being taken is fundamentally flawed.

The right approach, again, in my humble opinion, is to change the representation of the problem: Roads have to be smart. Cars smarter, yes, but roads need to be modified for robots. Change the problem you are trying to solve and the solution might just become massively simpler.

Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking lots and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are around to make it worth their while to install the technology.

When my kids were younger they had huge problems opening doors around the house that were equipped with spherical handles. If their hands were wet after washing them, even worst. So, we changed the problem: We installed lever type door handles and even the youngest kid with hands full of soap could open the door now.

But, hey, what do I know.