One thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of street now becomes a crosswalk. Even highways.
(This is an ironic statement)
(This is an ironic statement)
On a serious note: I'm sure strolling into highway traffic will be approximately as legal as it is presently.
Being a few meters off from a crosswalk cars will stop while they would easily be able to drive on before you (Which they would do in Belgium).
Even ignoring the privacy-scary scenarios of the car auto-emailing the cops to say "Dear local PD, this guy just jaywalked and halted traffic on Oak Ln, here's my [sensor gestalt] to prove it and a [photo of the offender]", it'd be pretty trivial for anyone owning a fleet of these machines who was tired of jaywalkers slowing down their commute to dump data on jaywalk-stops in the aggregate, giving cops all the numbers they need to target enforcement.
You can't play blindfolded frogger.
EDIT: "friction" is a better function name than "mu", even though we all feel nostalgic for high school physics.
Latency and Inertia still exist with autocars. Anyone wishing to challenge physics may as well be awarded a Darwin Award.
But a decent brake system and tires can do 1G, which is pretty good. I suppose you could go to maybe 5G for a true emergency brake system (which would be pretty rough on the occupants, eyeballs-out), but it hardly seems worth the cost (in money, weight, maintenance, accidental triggering, etc.) compared to good sensors and the existing braking systems.
It would ruin the car and likely damage the road but as long as the passengers can be protected from the rapid deceleration, it just might save a life.
OTOH you could just wrap the entire car in airbags and protect pedestrians the same way you protect the passengers. Not sure how practical or useful that would be, though.
While you can instantaneously stop a saw blade to save a finger, stopping a car 'quickly' will likely move the potential problem to one of ensuring the safety of the passengers...
<snark>I also don't see how a car could dive below the roadway instantly. Roads don't have car-sized holes in them. Usually.</snark>
Here's a demonstration, it's very fluffy but it gets the point across. https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk
IMHO one random day out of the year, you should be equipped with heavy machine guns and allowed to blast anyone in your way. A simple solution for a simple problem.
As a driver... well, I guess they're just being selfish idiots.
Might need to tighten up the jaywalking rules a bit, but nothing major.
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
All of this happened by the mid-1920s. As of 1925, the number of cars per household in USA was 0.6. (It would later peak in the 1980s at 2.2.)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Deployment_Caseb...
Is your hypothesis that the poor folks got cars first?
There's a million social elements here we haven't explored. Imagine driving through a ghetto and lots of people rush over to your car to rob you (or worse). Your car will happily brake for them, when a human would have recognized the situation and accelerated and veered off to avoid them. Or weird edges cases like garbage on the road or somesuch and the car not being able to outmaneuver it because it may be illegal, but a human with a more lax acceptance of traffic laws will veer into the right lane close to another car to avoid it.
Or just the daily grind of speed limits. On the expressways I drive the posted speed is 65-70 yet most everyone does 80-85. Doing a steady 60-65mph because of how laws were written to get speeding ticket revenue might be annoying. Especially if you're the only non-human driven car and everyone is speeding past you and honking because you're not going the speed of traffic.
... until the smart-grid notices the disturbance in regular traffic flow and auto-notifies the authorities that there's something weird going on on Oak Ln. every Monday morning during rush hour... ;)
Yes, of course! Just staying on a road is a piece of cake. Most of the research for self-driving cars is dealing with unexpected cars and pedestrians.
> And how safe are they?
According to the article, 1.7m miles driven without at at-fault accident. Self-driving cars drive very conservatively.
> What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?
Probably the same thing that happens when humans make visual mistakes: it would slow down and stop.
Of course, the self-driving car is looking at the tumbleweed in the visible spectrum, using LIDAR, maybe IR and probably some other sensors. We just have our squishy eyeballs.
I believe digital image recognition is better than human, and a lot faster to boot (hah!).
However, I was still wrong. Have a look at the summary paper from ImageNet: http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0575
Page 31 states: "Annotator A1 evaluated a total of 1500 test set images. The GoogLeNet classification error on this sample was estimated to be 6.8% (recall that the error on full test set of 100,000 images is 6.7%, as shown in Table 7). The human error was estimated to be 5.1%."
There are some bits there where GoogLeNet did better than human, but it was usually on specific classifications (what breed of dog is that, for example). Generally, a human is slightly better.
It's worth noting, however, that the error rate was halved from 2013's winners. I reckon the 2015 error rate will beat human, and in following years there will just be no contest. Just like chess programs have gone far beyond human capabilities.
And, of course, with cars we're talking about having multiple images plus depth perception, which makes it a lot easier for the machine.