Comment Re:This is great, but not very exciting (Score 1) 95
It's news because it's a different approach.
Except that it's not. Other self-driving cars, including Google's, already do route learning and mapping. The difference is that Google integrates that with stored maps, and and lots of other sensory input, including GPS. So these Oxford researchers are not doing something new, they are just doing less. In safety critical systems, removing redundancy is usually not a good idea.
One way to make their system more useful would be to upload learned routes to a server, so they can be auto-downloaded to other vehicles. Then your car could self-drive even on roads you haven't driven on before, as long as someone else has driven them.