Are there any fully autonomous cars on public roads with no driver that can intervene? Seems like only maybe in tightly constrained situations are we ready.
I thought of this after posting. Technically, there have been vehicles allow to operate fully autonomously on the road, yes. But I mean for non-research purposes, full-featured autonomous driving for consumer-owned vehicles.
I'm as incredulous as the next person that a mostly self-driving car will be available by 2017-8 and that this will be it.
That said, on the way to full autonomy I can foresee a car that can handle 99% of the driving itself but calls on the driver to help out during the other 1%. In such a scenario the car may know where it is and isn't safe to drive, but not exactly where, or when.
Examples include the 1-lane, 2-directions-of-traffic rural roads. Unmapped car parks and private premises. Navigating around roadworks. Basically all the 'edge-case' scenarios people often cite.
The car could guess the route and you use a joystick to control the forward speed. You can use the joystick to change the proposed route as you drive. And if you wanted to leave the detected 'safe area' ("no, I really do want to drive into that car - it's a tow truck and I need to get on it!") you acknowledge a bunch of ominous warnings and control the car directly, albeit at a very low speed.
There is no autonomous car that has been certified to be without someone who can drive it inside - and it's likely that such certification is still a few years away. I would guess it will take 2-3 years of cars driving on their own with hardly ever any need for a person to intervene before such certification is given.
In my city there are many small streets with bad traffic and environment, that at least once a week I need to verbally negotiate with other drivers who goes first and who goes back. If all cars are autonomous, they may negotiate that; But if only half are, I don't see how this will work.
Most US cities have the benefit of being built for cars; But most European cities do not; and even in the NYC, there are weird small streets that often require negotiation among drivers.
Yeah you don't even need to go to that extreme. I'm yet to see a self driving car handle the extremely common situation of meeting an oncoming car on a road that is effectively single lane because of cars parked on the side. Or just, and road layout more complicated than US-style grids.
Safe self driving cars without some kind of outside coordination with either the road or other vehicles is an impossibility. It's impossible to do this safely on a mass scale without the road infrastructure made for it.
How about autonomous on the highway, turnpikes, etc. And human-operated on streets where a car might ever need to yield to pedestrians or cyclists outside of red-lights.
Fortunately we're still quite a long ways away from self driving cars in the sense of truly driverless cars that can be relied upon to navigate safely on their own in random settings, like a city block.
Yes, but for self-driving cars, the problem seems more surmountable. We already have cars that can drive in real traffic without intervention a large % of the time. There are plenty of edge cases, but they don't seem insurmountable.
There are currently self-driving vehicles operating on public roads with no safety driver. That tech exists now. It may have many severe limitations (precision mapping, weather, construction areas, etc), but it does exist. Reducing those limitations may be a long term project but it is already clear that self driving vehicles could be deployed today without human controls as long as the scope of deployment matches those limitations.
This rules allows car manufacturers to work on new fully automous cars without controls that are designed to function as campus shuttles or taxis in a limited scope. There is still a lot of work to be done regulating the use self driving vehicles, but this removes a safety regulation hurdle that is stopping states and car makers from experimenting with different approaches.
I wasn't replying to the person, I was replying to /you/.
The impression I got from your statement was that you consider fully autonomous vehicles not far off. I disagree.
The point I was making was that the vehicles you see driving around are literally fair-weather vehicles.
A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder.
To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
I agree that there are difficult regulatory issues to figure out, but don't underestimate the technical hurdles.
Interesting as something to explore, but I'm curious if a network of self-driving cars can be optimized to recognize and avoid these situations altogether.
I think I am going to side with VW on this. I have always been skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles, and I do not believe they will _ever_ exist on the roads that currently stand. Driving safely in all conditions without aid from a human is simply too complex a task for code that can be audited and verified. If some AI model that's been trained on a billion years of driving experience shows promise, but it is some incomprehensible black box of weights, I won't be getting in that car.
Autonomous vehicles will only ever truly exist upon infrastructure literally designed to aid them, greatly simplifying how they need to interact with the environment, thus making the problem tractable with code we can prove works. I really think it will take more than putting markings on existing roads. It is going to take new roads full stop, probably with various wireless checkpoints built into them.
That’s not true, there are fully autonomous vehicles. The reason we don’t see it daily — and I doubt we ever will - is that AI will always make mistakes. But you can’t put in jail an AI and the way they make mistakes is unpredictable to humans.
The capability we have today is working on fully mapped, well lit, dry roads. No one has an automatic car that could navigate in heavy snow/rain or unmapped terrain. There's very few ideas how to tackle it, unless we equip every road in some sort of trackers. I fully believe that in short time we will have all sorts of very clever cruise control systems which are essentially like Tesla Autopilot, maybe a bit more versatile. But fully autonomous vehicles? I stand by my statement that they are very far away for commercial distribution, unless you plan on selling them in Florida only, or only for use on private land.
A certain amount of over familiarity with western driving conditions blinds these attempts to the reality that there are two worlds on the roads - the legal and socially manufactured layer and reality.
Which is why looking at the actual problem space, like nations where road rules tend to be ignored, makes it clear that what you actually have to solve for.
It has been highlighted before - but the autonomous car can only work if the road itself is active / aware
It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example:
- communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block the road, allowing just one car through. Or traffic light out of action, so you negotiate with other cars using hand gestures, light flashes etc
- endless roadworks, that change what lane you're allowed to go on, turn a two way road to one way road.
- random debris on road. Plastic bag - safe to drive through, wooden plank - safe, plank with nail - not safe.
- loss of GPS, mobile data, or both (again, surprisingly frequent)
- making way for emergency vehicles (sometimes need to drive into lane you're not normally allowed to go, I.e. Bus lane, pavement)
- policeman coordinating traffic
So far, I haven't found any evidence of autonomous cars dealing with the above. If anyone has, please post.
I don't know a lot about the topic, how well do the current autonomous vehicles handle roads not currently on GPS , I.e private drives and such.
I now understand it can handle the terrain, thanks for the explanation that is pretty neat they could do it thirty years ago, just curious when I tell it to go to a house in the middle of a 20 acre property with multiple private roads, and I use the term road lightly, if it is actively going to search for a path or if it will have to have manual intervention.
I have seen google cars handle well mapped streets, just curious.
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