Comment Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? (Score 2) 287
Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable.
Are you guessing this based on Moore's law?
Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable.
Are you guessing this based on Moore's law?
Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human,
I'd really be interested if you have a reference for this. Even if your reference is just a Google PR person, that's still better than nothing.
Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist.
If you're going to quibble about credentials, you ought to at least read the summary, where the MIT roboticist says he doesn't expect to see fully self-driving cars in his lifetime. Do you think he is confused too?
The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage.
It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and
its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
Because it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper, it will try to drive around both if it encounters either sitting in the middle of the road.
Use a little imagination and you can surely think of other issues.
Given that safety is one of the governments biggest reasons for existing
Wow. I'm not sure that's actually true........
While there is serious obstacle to overcome for a fully autonomous car, the point the author make is weak.
The author made more than one point.
A car working in a limited area, with good condition, let's say you start with a city. And sensor mapping everything all the time (including when human drive) would bring massive input of information. With increase capability of detection. Incrementally increasing the covered area.
Google themselves say the problem of mapping the US in enough detail is too big. They're hoping to find a better way to do it (though of course with uninvented technology everything is possible).
Automation of detection of light/traffic sign is a problem on which a lot of people are working, not only google, expect this problem to be "solved" before long.
People have been working on this problem, probably for longer than you've been alive.
All the car are connected. This would make it that much harder to miss one given all the "eyes" watching for them.
That's another very interesting technology that still exists in the realm of theory. It's nice but it's not the Google car.
"The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again."
And that is even before getting to the engineering problem of reliable software. When Boeing built their recent airline software package, it took 5-8 years to get something that was reliable enough for air travel. And air travel is a much simpler problem than driving a car.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton
