VW Raises the Bar for Self-Driving Vehicles 177
Old Man Kensey writes "According to the UK Daily Mail, VW has produced a prototype Golf (code-named "53 plus 1" in a reference to Herbie the Love Bug) that successfully steers and accelerates itself at speeds up to 150 MPH on tracks designed on the spot without pre-programming. It sounds almost too good to be true given some of the problems CMU's prototype has had over the years, but perhaps VW has learned from and extended CMU's research (and within-an-inch GPS positioning probably helps too)."
No signal (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No signal (Score:5, Funny)
A tunnel?!?! OHhh NOOOOoooooo...!!
Re:No signal (Score:2)
Re:No signal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No signal (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure I've seen my van do that.
What I wonder about is why the link doesn't go the other way. I live in a hilly area. Some hills are large, some are tiny. The large hills can trip up the automatic transmission on my car. By the time it decides "I ought to downshift" I'm at about the bottom of the hill and and it has to shift back almost immediatly. Now I have learned how to avoid this by when I push the gas on those hills and such, but it got me thinking.
Why not use mapping data to feed the autom
Re:No signal (Score:2)
Daily Mail (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Daily Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Daily Mail (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Daily Mail (Score:2)
"Scientists predict that the pill to cure cancer will be available in about 5 years"
"Scientists predict that the flying car will be available in the shops in about 5 years"
etc. etc.
Papers like the daily mail take a few random facts and build an entire mythology around them... unfortunately they don't just do it for their science pieces - the daily mail is legendary for doing it with political issues too (google for the 'daily mail island' sketch.. still as funny now as
Re:Daily Mail (Score:2)
A healthly amount of skepticism when dealing with the Daily Mail would be wise.
Re:Daily Mail (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/0,1518,424288,
Unfortunately, the article does not seem to available in English.
Re:Daily Mail (Score:5, Informative)
Well, in summary (I just read the Spiegel article), the car in question first learns the track based on traffic cones. Actually, the only thing this cars knows are traffic cones. A program then runs on the collected data and calculates the "ideal" path. When the finanlly activate the "racing mode", the car "simply" drives the studied track and that *blindly*. There need not to be any traffic cones, and it will not stop if something unexpected happens (so if a rabbit jumps in it's way, the researches will have rabbit for dinner) It does react a bit on the data from the sensors in the racing mode, but it's more for avoiding small variations in the track like a wet spot.
The car itself is pretty much a standard Golf GTI 2.0 Turbo (200HP) and the only thing they changed was stronger braking. They use the default sensors to make the program learn. Also, in the Spiegel article, there is not any mention of GPS.
Oh, and the research isn't intended to make auto-driving cars for you and me. They want to create a way that cars do exactly the same test runs on test-tracks to check the settings of the car. The results would be more reproductible. If anything, this tech is to put test-drivers out of work ;-)
They also mention that some of the tech was derived from a Touareg that they used in a competition of the US Defense Department in the Nevada desert. However, that one had completely different goals.
I'm sorry that I didn't translate the whole thing, but it was just too long.
Re:Daily Mail (Score:2)
Re:Daily Mail (Score:3, Funny)
Volkswagen of the company of the thing to which it at least goes councils of the technology of the administration of the human being of machine for the second one turns the realizer. For how much regards those rather than to make the last one scompartimento, without suspensoid of the operator of fast warm turret widely. The mirror of 1 where same they are the lines given it are hit in any case. It is not sufficient time. Handlingparkors we have given to the problem, officially har
You call that a translation? (Score:2)
Re:You call that a translation? (Score:4, Funny)
Research (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Research (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that academics can pursue riskier, more speculative areas of research. It's cost-effective for them to do so; they've got less overhead and grad students are cheap, and success criteria is different than for businesses -- publish a bunch of well-regarded, widely-cited papers, and you're in good shape. (you never need to earn back the investment money)
However, academics get their money from businesses and funding agencies who do have their eye on the bottom line. If an academic doesn't work on something that they feel is relevant (or abandons research they're funded to do in order to work on something cooler) then the money dries up really fast.
I've been on both sides of this (currently funder, formerly fundee) and I can tell you without doubt that academic research is a market, just like everything else.
Re:Research (Score:2)
Re:Research (Score:2)
Re:Research (Score:2)
Re:Research (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a few points ab
Oiled (Score:4, Funny)
Self-Driving Vehicle promptly hits the bar, gets thoroughly oiled and rolls off into the red light district looking for a "service".
And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:5, Interesting)
And that bug is probably fixed by now, but the problem is, how do we determine we worked out all the bugs? We can't even do that with Linux/Windows/Anything. The closest we come to that in the OS world is a microkernel with only a few thousands lines of code and controlled input.
But how do we ever determine a program that learns and is subject to varying, uncontrolled data inputs is bug free? You can't and I wouldn't want to see the first literal blue screen of death when it happens.
I don't want to sound like a luddite, but the article mentions that planes have been flying autopilot (did they forget to mention landing/taking off is still done by the pilot) since the 1970s. But I believe we'll have flying cars before self-driving* cars because the problem is several hundreds of a magnitude easier in empty 3D space where all you have to do is stay high enough off the ground and avoid collisions via radar/whatnot.
*The only way is I see anything coming close to a self-driving car is on highways where lanes get marked magnetically and driving problem gets reduce to the car having to stay X feet behind the car in front of it.
Duh (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
In the world of private automobiles, it would be different. The better the car got at driving itself, the more likely the "driver" would focus all his attention on something incompatible with monitoring the car. Just compare drivers of stick and automatic. The stick drivers mus
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
I do think you make a good point about segregation of the autodrive cars and the others since even if the autodriver isn't necessarily the best driver on the road, it will "think", drive, and react differently than a human driver. I think as a human, I would eventually learn to anticipate the actions of an autodriver just as
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, Windows is an operating system. That means every day hundreds of brand new programs are written for it that have the possibility of screwing each other, and the system, up. If windows was only capable of running one program (Office, probably), the crash rate would go down to 1/1000000 (which, I believe, is better than human drivers)
Secondly, when windows crashes nobody DIES. Compare car-driving programs to programs that run in hospitals
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
But seriously the original poster was saying they need to have better driving abilities than a 16 year old. Though having a world of 17 year old virtual drivers scares me as well.
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Considering many of the drivers round here, I'd rather they used a cyberchauffeur...
(Incidently, the Chauffeur were 'Brigands in bands, who, about 1793, pillaged, burned, and killed in parts of France; -- so called because they used to burn the feet of their victims to ex
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
In the first times of railroads, the driver had to keep the engine hot, hence the name.
The fact that this Brigand was called Chauffeur as well is coincidental.
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
Re:And this is why I don't feel comfortable (Score:2)
VW Raises the Bar (Score:2, Funny)
No more soft drinks for the "designated driver".
Just for race tracks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just for race tracks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just for race tracks (Score:2, Informative)
The purpose of the 53+1 is not autonomous driving. The goal was to create a platform for testing new parts
(new tires, brakes, etc.). In order to truly compare the performance of those parts you need a system that
can drive the same course over and over in the most efficient way.
The goal is not autonomous driving but obtaining reproduceable results on testing tracks.
(There's a german article that explains t
Re:Just for race tracks (Score:2)
So this car is of use to people who have a private road and make the same tr
I can't believe it's not been done yet .... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I can't believe it's not been done yet .... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I can't believe it's not been done yet .... (Score:2)
Details are little more than sketchy, but... (Score:2)
In case anyone is still stuck.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In case anyone is still stuck.... (Score:2)
Driverless cars (Score:2)
Reminds me of a William Gibson novel... (Score:2)
So... What problem does it solve? (Score:2)
You're going to be spending just as much money on the vehicle, using just as much energy, producing just as much pollution and spending just as much time stuck in traffic.
While automated driving is cool and interesting, it's not revoluti
It solves a lot of problems, actually (Score:4, Interesting)
The holy grail is cars that talk to each other to get around more efficiently yet. If the traffic up ahead narrows from four lanes to two because of construction, and car computers can talk to each other and say "Hey, you're two miles back but get ready for this", then orderly traffic flow can be maintained as the cars merge into the remaining lanes and decelerate. This in turn saves gas, etc.
Hell, think how much money you'd save if you car just automatically avoided potholes if it could. Tires, struts, shocks, suspension, all those would last much longer. Look at the figures on how much money it costs drivers annually in a city like Baltimore that's infested with chuckholed roads.
Re:So... What problem does it solve? (Score:2)
I enjoy being in control of my car too, but I think I'd be willing to give it up when I got onto a freeway if I knew all the vehicles around me would be driving consistently and intelligently. Just as long as I can still switch over
Nice, but not enough. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if they managed to get this car travelling at 20mph down a city street during rush hour, we'd really have something useful on our hands.
Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed. But a self-driving car on an empty track is a million miles away from the everyday driving conditions we encounter.
hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
This would imply to me that the position has been filled.
VW? Reliability and Quality SUCK. (Score:2)
They suck.
That said, these jokers can't even design an ABS controller that lasts 5 years. How the hell do they think that they're QUALIFIED to design a life critical componant like this?
Re:VW? Reliability and Quality SUCK. (Score:2)
How is calculating the fastest route round a cone layed out track "life critical"?
Re:VW? Reliability and Quality SUCK. (Score:2)
Re:VW? Reliability and Quality SUCK. (Score:2)
"My girlfriend drives a 2003 New Beetle. It is nearing 100000km now. Only problems so far was a punctured radiator (hardly VW's fault) and a loose electrical connection that made the dashes light flicker from time to time."
We had an intermittent FAILURE to start which ulitimately ( $500 labor, $10 wire ) was traced to a corroded wire/poor ground.
Watch that flickering dash light problem. It'll likely get worse.
Re:VW? Reliability and Quality SUCK. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Self-driving? How about quality and reliability (Score:2)
It does need a clutch,
It seems like you've had a bad experience (Score:2)
Just one question - you know an awful lot about specific VW problems. Do you keep buying new VW's so you can find out more? Is there some other, darker problem you'd like to discuss?
Re:It seems like you've had a bad experience (Score:2)
Re:Self-driving? How about quality and reliability (Score:2)
Slashdot ate the euros (Score:2)
1 inch GPS (Score:5, Informative)
So they are cheating if you consider the real world.
I've been in a car that could drive its self on one very well surveyed road. If it got confused it would beep and assume the human was in control within a second. The internal guidance system alone cost over 1/3 of a million dollars and it used several different GPS systems to cross check the fiber gyro.
The only way cars are going to take over for driving the mini-van in place of the drive soccer mom is if there is a serious attempt to clean up the road markings. This means no more optional parking on the side as a road will either be a parking spot or a lane. Signs will need to be redone and cleaned up. The white lines must be far more precise than they are now and more places will need to deal with the yellow centerline (which has now been dropped in the EU even though its the cheapest road safety device ever)
Things have gone a long way. 2 decades ago I had a system that would indicate that a steering adjustment needed to be done. A decade ago there was Miata convertible that could maintain road position and deal with deer. This year we have a VW that can avoid traffic cones. Maybe in a decade we can see a car that can avoid the phone talking, breakfast eating SUV driver.
Raising The Bar... (Score:2, Funny)
Speeding tickets (Score:3, Interesting)
Car pulled over by the highway patrol for doing 150 in a 65 zone.
Officer is puzzled by the fact that the only person in the car is asleep, in the back seat.
"Did you know what speed you were doing, sir?"
"Huh, um, wha? Oh - the car was driving, Officer".
Car has to appear in court next Wednesday.
Again, (Score:2)
I don't understand why car companies are wasting time and money in developing self driven cars. While there might be useful purposes for the technology, such as "off-world" exploration, or for use in the military, there will never come a time when we turn over control of our cars to a computer and sit back and enjoy the r
could someone please give stanford their due? (Score:2)
Re:could someone please give stanford their due? (Score:2)
We could probably have self-driving cars today... (Score:2)
However, we have all the technology to enable such a vehicle, especially if we limit it to highway travel (where conditions tend to be less variable than surface streets). One such improvement for guidance would be a combination of active and passive "dots" lining the lanes. The passive ones could be simple rare-earth magnets. The active ones would
Re:We could probably have self-driving cars today. (Score:2)
This can't come too soon (Score:3, Insightful)
Estimates for the costs of crashes range from 10 to 30 cents/mile, factoring in everything -- health, repairs, suffering -- which is more than the cost of gasoline or depreciation.
It's now down to an engineering problem to build self-driving, crash-avoiding cars. It's the largest preventable cause of suffering and death we have.
Re:GPS? (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:5, Informative)
I can claim to be a "rocket scientist", at least I have designed systems for satellite control and tracking, and I work for an aerospace company.
You cannot measure a position to within less than a centimeter using GPS. You can design a ranging system that gives you a measurement with enough numbers to represent that precision, but it doesn't mean that you can trust such numbers.
You cannot use GPS to give you better measurements than the accuracy of the GPS constellation orbit determination, and the satellites' positions vary more or less randomly due to residual atmosphere, solar wind, and solar radiation pressure. The end result is that GPS cannot give any reliable measurement to less than 10 cm, and one meter is closer to the best that one can accomplish in practical situations.
A more accurate system than GPS is LAGEOS [wikipedia.org], which has satellites that are much heavier and smaller than the GPS satellites. They are basically brass balls covered with mirrors. Because of that higher density, LAGEOS satellites suffer less perturbation from non-gravitational solar and atmospheric effects. However, the equipment for doing ranging with LAGEOS satellites is not portable, it's meant for geodesy studies, not navigation.
A good overview of different satellite ranging systems can be found in "Satellite Orbits", by O. Montenbruck and E. Gill, ISBN 3-540-67280-X, and here is a Wikipedia link [wikipedia.org] for the most accurate satellite ranging systems.
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think, that the satellite positions vary randomly in the sense, that they have gaussian variance in a deliberatly short intervall of time. But their positions contain a systematic error, which can be determined via a fixed known position (actually more, but who cares) and thereby be corrected. This, in general, is the principle behind DGPS. The accuracy does not depend as much on the position of the satelites, but the discrepancy between the systematic error between the fixed known position and the unknown one.
That said, I'm still sceptical concerning the quoted accuracy. Especially for a moving object, like a car.
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:2)
I mean, considering we get accurate measurements of things like atoms, that's a much bigger difference in scale.
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:2)
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:2)
You are right, the satellite positions don't change randomly in a short interval of time, but their position *measurements* from Earth are noisy, and therefore vary randomly from one measurement to the other. Their orbits aren't known with absolute precision, becaus
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:2)
Real pure gaussian noise can be arbitrarily reduced by averaging/filtering. The noise only determines the convergence speed for getting an sufficient accurate result. The limiting factor for accuracy for a fixed object, however, is the systematic error.
Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you can. I just woke up, but I'll see if I can explain.
In the case of DGPS, the reference station uses its surveyed coordinate to difference the time encoded in the signals it is receiving against the time it would expect given an estimation of where the satellite is. So any error in the satellite's predicted position is lumped in with all the other naturally occuring forms of error.
In the case of RTK, or other forms of relative carrier phase positioning, the system attempts to determine and track the difference in the number of cycles of the carrier wave of the GPS signal between the base and the satellite and the rover and the satellite. This number multiplied by the length of the carrier wave, 19cm for L1 signals, gives you the length of one side of a triangle between the base station, the rover, and the point between the rover and satellite that is as far from the satellite as the base station is. So, the exact position of the satellite is not as important as the sight line vector the satellite forms against the base line between the base station and rover. And given the great distance of the satellite from the typical base station and rover, jitter in the satellite's position doesn't change that vector much.
In conclusion, given the advances in relative positioning, limiting factors on GPS positioning today are the accuracy of the survey points, the ability of the electronics to precisely measure the carrier phase/doppler of the GPS signal, the quality of the clock in the GPS unit and the speed/accuracy of the algorithms that determine the carrier cycle count difference.
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:2)
Right, and do you know what is the order of magnitude of those naturally occurring forms of error? Let's see: ionospheric refraction, considering scintillation activity is in the order of 1.5 meters. Tropospheric refraction is about 2.2 meters. Code multipath is 1.5 meters. Adding these we have an RMS error of 3 meters, even ignoring other factors, like antenna gain and receiver noise tempe
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:4, Interesting)
And your point is? These types of errors you list (including satelite path deviations) are presisely what DGPS corrects for if the well known GPS is in relatively close proximity to the onboard GPS. In that case, these unknown variabilities will be reasonably well correlated so they will be removed when taking the differential. (ie. satelite orbit changes, ionospheric refraction etc., though unpredictable, will be nearly exaxtly the same for both GPSs so it gets subtracted out). In my work we generally get DGPS accuracies of less than half a meter which is well below your quoted error of 3 meters RMS.
For use with autonomous vehicles, one can generally do a lot better when the DGPS is augmented with a ground based equivalent of GPS like Terralites (XPS) which can and do routinely give accurate positions in the 1cm range.
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:3, Informative)
Civilian ground based DGPS sy
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:2)
No. DGPS can have an effect in eliminating some systematic errors, but that's all. It has no effect at all in improving random errors caused by noise in the system, like ionospheric scintillation. Scintillation is interesting because NASA uses GPS to measure scintillation [nasa.gov]. That is, they have a DGPS-like network of stations, and the errors in the measurements from those stations are used to det
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:2)
With RTK GPS systems, we routinely achieve 1cm repeatability.
On a moving vehicle?
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:2)
On a moving vehicle?
Yes.
Think about how quickly the satellites are moving even when you are sitting still. Even then, you are only sitting still with respect to the surface of the planet, not with respect to the orbit of the satellites.
One neat side effect of measuring the doppler effect on the GPS signals, which is simply counting the carrier cycles and comparing it against the expected frequency, is that you are essentially keeping track of the relative range between you and the satellite. So once
Re:Comments on Slashdot aren't reliable either... (Score:2)
So once you figure out the ambiguity that locks in your position relative to the base station at one point in time
Interesting. Do you need to be stationary for a period of time to calibrate your initial position?
Re:Wikipedia is not reliable (Score:2)
Re:GPS? (Score:2)
Re:GPS? (Score:2)
By comparing the propagation delay between the L1 (1575.42 MHz) and the L2 (1227.6 MHz) frequencies you can model ionosphere effects and achieve quite a bit of improvement.
Real Time Differential only gives you sub-meter results, regardless of what wikipedia states.
Real Time Kinematic; using a receiver set up on a know point which transmits a correction factor for every satellite to your rover, is the best way to achieve cm level results (in real time).
As for why - land sur
Re:Rocker-Bogie (Score:2)
Cute and ingenious design but not something you'd want to go faster than about 2mph.
(Let the obvious rocker-boogie jokes begin...)
Re:But it's FUN to drive! (Score:2)
My suggestion is to let her win whatever argument she wants to have and then you can be both in the back seat on the drive home from the alcohol induced party and let the car drive.
Oh wait a minute this is slashdot... Well as long as you have a DVD play