Maybe at some point, the cars get to talk to each other when they detect proximity to another self-driving car. Then they can negotiate either time slices for sensor use, or even sensor data sharing.
OTHO, the thought of untrusted cars meeting up on the streets and forming a mesh network to exchange vital information is really scary.
The only thing I am concerned with is how secure / exploitable they are from a computer security perspective. I assume there will be some kind of link between the vehicular peripherals to vehicle control and configuration. Then I worry about who is actually controlling the car. I'm open to AI driven cars with redundant intelligent networks, but people are smart too, and some people are not nice people. How do you know that the entire system is functioning as expected? I'm pretty sure that's NP hard.
It's my understanding that these broadcasts are supposed to aid other vehicles with their predictions in self-driving scenarios. I'm not necessarily against some sort of protocol for self driving cars to communicate with one another for this purpose, but the proposed solution seems to be severely lacking in basic security.
It will be interesting to see how people exploit the A.I.
There might be little tricks you could do to make an autonomous car yield. Or if you see one about to park, maybe you could get really close to it, and it would try to find another spot instead of fighting for the spot. Or pedestrians might carelessly walk in front of it, knowing it will stop for them.
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It will also be interesting to see how the technology changes as whole fleets of them are deployed. They will constantly be sending each other data: pothole detected on highway; I'm ahead of you and have braked suddenly; this road is congested, use alternate route; is there a parking spot close to my location?; tsunami warning - all cars go to high ground.
I would like to add, if the vehicles entirely depend on their AI, then there should be at least 3 or 4 compute nodes and a voting system. Should a node fail or have false information, the other nodes should override.
Is there any article/video (I didn't investigate) showing multiple autonomous cars interacting ? I'd be curious to see if there's any behavioral resonance leading to epic havoc.
Once automated cars make up a significant fraction of cars on the road I would expect some communication scheme to emerge to make them coordinate with each other, maybe even sharing observed positions of other road participants.
There is the risk that they will misbehave or deadlock around each other, but also a great opportunity for them to communicate intent to each other at a level human drivers just can't do from a sound-insulated cabin.
I would like to see how a street full of all Teslas manage to avoid each other, or plow into each other. A sort of AI driven automotive musical chairs.
Creating a local mesh network for cars to communicate is an idea I've had for a while. Something like an open hardware and software stack/protocol for future autonomous cars. It's an inevitable thing that must exist to realize the full potential of autonomous cars, all a question if I'd be the one to build it :).
Would be curious to know the current work in this area.
More I read about AV, more I get the idea that, these AVs need to think to some extent like a human driver. My notion is that, these AV research focus blindly on making individual cars think too much. Am curious what happens if the thinking and data-collection is distributed instead, like swarm intelligence, each AV nearby can broadcast what it sees and where it is(extends the vision of each car in a given location beyond it's own sensors); front car suddenly breaks/had an accident/roadblock/switched to human intervention => all following cars will negotiate if they should bypass(reporting car will be parking) or wait (reporting car will use another lane); a car is on a blind turn => oncoming traffic from both sides can negotiate if this car should attempt the turn because others are far enough/slow enough to let it turn safely or wait until they are gone(high speed so not enough time for turning car before that one approaches); a road is very confusing so all cars following should switch to/request human intervention with ample time ... etc and given how cellular phones switch nicely between different towers and areas, we can use similar tech to allow all nearby cars to communicate ... that is communicate, coordinate and decide. Now this have some issues like privacy, drivers with bad intention can feed bad data to cause mass confusion, legitimacy of data received etc ... which can probably be an interesting place to borrow some ideas from blockchain to verify legitimacy etc ... I think instead of focusing too much on ml, try to incorporate other techs which solve minor but similar issues is a good idea.
Disclaimer: I do not claim to have full/partial/enough understanding of any AV technology/blockchain/distributed computing/swarm intelligence etc... so my comment is more or less an opinion based on what I think may be interesting, which may or may not be already thought by and discarded for not-enough viability by the AV research.
AI cars could communicate amongst themselves to forewarn each other. They would instantly know typical driving patterns for any location at particular times and in particular conditions. A human would know that for their usual routes at best.
That assumes that the cars have some mechanism to wirelessly communicate over very large distances. Are you sure these cars are being designed with mesh-style communications?
Yeah, there would be advantages in the cars exchanging data, but you could have that while still leaving the final decisions up to the individual car (rather than being dictated by a centralized controller).
That's more or less what ants and bees do -- they exchange information with each other, but each unit is still quasi-independent.
And sing kumbaya, holding hands together....
What about adversarial car AIs? Malicious actors, etc.?
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