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Old 11-17-2015, 12:16 AM   #141
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If Mercedes can do an autonomous car without the spinning LIDAR, and I mean a true autonomous car that can navigate busy city streets and not one that just stays on a highway lane, then they know something Google doesn't. I will be watching to learn more about them on the Web.


I do not disagree!

The problem is that the 5% where the computer needs help becomes really problematic, to put it mildly, if there is no steering wheel or any other human manual controls.
Here it is... yes, steering wheel etc. there... but it was driving around city streets...

"60 Minutes" test-rides Mercedes-Benz self-driving car - Videos - CBS News
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Old 11-17-2015, 01:12 AM   #142
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To borrow from Malcolm Gordon, a demo is "like a bikini bathing suit, what it reveals is interesting, but what it conceals is essential".

In the demo above, the narrator said that "he [the researcher] punched in a route and took us for a 20-minute ride". In this article, another concept car by Mercedes was said to be "not even fully autonomous; it's programmed only to go along a predetermined path on the Alameda runway", yet its performance appeared impressive.

Same as some demo video from Google, what these researchers have done is really wonderful, but they are not going to volunteer what they have not been able to do, or what problems they are still working on. Some impressive prototypes were demonstrated as early as 20 years ago. Why are they still working on it? See excerpts below from Wikipedia.
PROMETHEUS profited from the participation of Ernst Dickmanns, the 1980s pioneer of driverless cars, and his team at Bundeswehr Universität München, collaborating with Daimler-Benz. A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when their twin robot vehicles VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.[citation needed]

The next culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1000-mile trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 km. In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.
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Old 11-17-2015, 04:44 AM   #143
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Not to mention various gestures from other drivers...

Do self-driving cars have a "road rage" mode?
Maybe one of those old modules from Robocop? What could go wrong?

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Old 11-17-2015, 05:15 AM   #144
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I don't think these cars have a human mind to have road rage.

About the CBS 60 Minutes segment, I no longer watch much TV so missed it. The full video requires subscription to view, but I found a free page with a transcript of it. It is at: Hands off the Wheel - CBS News.

The transcript describes exactly why I think Google has a more advanced or at least more interesting technology. It is because they put AI (artificial intelligence) into their prototype.
Bill Whitaker: There are so many variables, so many different scenarios. How is it possible to put all of that knowledge into a car?

Chris Urmson: And that's really the trick, right? And that's what makes this hard. You can't just kind of go through and enumerate, you know, the thousand different scenarios it might encounter, 'cause it's not 1,000. There's an infinite number of them, right? And so the trick is to develop these algorithms that can generalize.

By generalize, he means "think" and this is how it works. The algorithms are trained to recognize other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and animals from their movements, size, and shape. Each car's daily driving experience is analyzed, uploaded and shared. The cars can then make predictions and choices based on the collective knowledge of the fleet. Look in the lower left corner as one of Urmson's cars encounters a pickup truck that stops to parallel park.

Bill Whitaker: Now, how does the computer know that it's someone intending to back into a parking space, and not someone who's just stopped in the street?

Chris Urmson: Our cars have seen thousands and thousands of vehicles. And they get a feeling, you know, they get a feeling really for what the behavior of those vehicles are going to be.

Bill Whitaker: Really?

Chris Urmson: So its seen lots of cars backing up and so it understands if there's a space here, and a car stopped just in front of it, that means it's gonna probably back into that spot.
AI inference software takes huge amount of computing power. I believe that's the reason Google car is limited to 25 mph to give the computer time to "think", and also for the test driver to take over.

What are other limitations that these researchers are working on now? This comes from that 60 Minutes transcript.
Right now, the technology can't handle snow. Google's cars can't operate in heavy rain. The Mercedes S500 can't decipher hand gestures from traffic cops or pedestrians. Four million miles of roads in the U.S. must be mapped in ultra high-definition detail. The automakers call these solvable problems. In the meantime, the car industry plans to automate the driving experience feature-by-feature, what some are calling revolution-by-evolution.
Sometimes a sensor can have a basic limitation that's insurmountable because of the laws of physics. I recall an experiment many years ago with LIDAR. A research was conducted to apply it for wire strike avoidance by low-flying aircraft. It was found that the laser would scatter off old dull wires and let them be "seen". New and shiny wires would reflect the laser in a direction that may not hit the receptor back at the aircraft, hence would not be "seen". I do not know if they could ever overcome that.

The public is usually enthusiastic about new technological advances because it is not told of difficulties, caveats, or limitations. Experts know about the problems they face, but will always say that they can solve it. Maybe they will. Maybe they cannot. It's just not a sure thing.
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Old 11-17-2015, 05:44 AM   #145
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I think that the self driving car can do 95% or more of the driving... the last 5% can be done by humans... as an example, picking up the Aunt at terminal 4... heck, you can be watching TV etc. in the car and when you get there you park and go looking for Auntie....
If the self-driving car can do just 95% of the driving, it has only about 10% of the utility of a truly 100% autonomous vehicle. The "big deal" about a truly driverless car is the ability for it to autonomously relocate itself for storage and to prepare to move someone. That's what allows the car to be used in ways that are non-feasible for a car that needs a driver. If it can't autonomously pick up Aunt Nellie, go home to serve as the "second car" after dropping off a commuter, drive to the "outlot" to store itself out of the city, if it can't allow mobility for a person who can't physically drive, etc then it loses a lot of utility. If a car still needs to have an operator aboard at all times for the few unusual situations, then really the person might as well be driving the car.
Still, maybe the 10% remaining utility will be enough to produce some demand and advance the technology and the legislative/public acceptance until true 100% autonomy is practical.
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Old 11-17-2015, 10:24 AM   #146
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Here's a video of a Tesla Model S auto braking (not autopilot) to avoid an accident with a car turning in front of it:

Tesla Model S Auto Braking Prevents Accident - Video

That was some pretty quick decision making.

I have thought of plenty of situations that would be very difficult for autopilot to handle. Crossing a flooded intersection comes to mind this time of year.

Google said they were parading kids in Halloween costumes in front of their cars so they could get better recognition data. They are thinking about it. They also want California to approve beta testing with non-professional drivers in cars without backup manual controls, including steering. So they're going for the whole enchilada.
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Old 11-17-2015, 12:32 PM   #147
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I have thought of plenty of situations that would be very difficult for autopilot to handle. Crossing a flooded intersection comes to mind this time of year.
For what a Tesla costs I'd expect marine navigation capabilities.
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Old 11-17-2015, 02:12 PM   #148
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For what a Tesla costs I'd expect marine navigation capabilities.
No air intake or exhaust, so it might do fairly well.
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Old 11-17-2015, 04:31 PM   #149
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I have thought of plenty of situations that would be very difficult for autopilot to handle. Crossing a flooded intersection comes to mind this time of year.
I don't believe any of these self driving cars claim to have the ability to operate under severe conditions like snow storms or heavy rain. It's currently mostly a fair weather technology.
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Old 11-18-2015, 06:05 AM   #150
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How eerie - AI = automated intuition.

After decades of driving in all sorts of situations, I, too, have a "feel" for what a driver might do, depending on things I'm not even sure I saw (did I see the car's wheels turn slightly to the right for a nanosecond? Is that how I just KNEW the driver was going to cut in front of us, and was able to avoid hitting him?)

Given the collective "wisdom" of a whole fleet, and no human fatigue or distractions, imaging the "intuitive" power these machines can leverage.

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I
Chris Urmson: Our cars have seen thousands and thousands of vehicles. And they get a feeling, you know, they get a feeling really for what the behavior of those vehicles are going to be.

Bill Whitaker: Really?

Chris Urmson: So its seen lots of cars backing up and so it understands if there's a space here, and a car stopped just in front of it, that means it's gonna probably back into that spot.
.
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Old 11-18-2015, 08:44 AM   #151
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Yesterday, I was driving to Kaanapali beach walk and tried to look for parking in a very congested area with some public parking spaces jammed in between hotels and shops. All were occupied, and I had to settle for an expensive paid slot in a multi-level parking garage ($3/half-hour).

I thought about a robot car, and wonder how it could even begin to navigate this mess. You will understand if you see the map that the LIDAR produces. It is not that detailed and precise. The LIDAR gives you distances to surrounding obstacles. It does not tell you what those obstacles are. And then, a human eye can see between parked cars, and his mind can map out the layout of the parking lots with other cues such as rows of trees, fences, lamp posts, etc... What one needs is sensor fusion software to combine the LIDAR with the vision cameras.

I have not seen anyone doing the above. It takes a lot of very smart software. In time perhaps, but they do not have it yet.

I have yet to see someone demonstrating a car navigating a parking lot that has not been mapped out in advance. I do not think the current robot cars know how to find the entrances or exits of a parking lot (I spotted the toll booth), let alone a parking garage. The software needs to be a lot smarter than its current state.
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Old 11-18-2015, 09:01 AM   #152
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What one needs is sensor fusion software to combine the LIDAR with the vision cameras.

I have not seen anyone doing the above. It takes a lot of very smart software. In time perhaps, but they do not have it yet.
Thoughts:
1) If they can do the sensor fusion right, it will actually be better than humans can do. Especially since the computers can do signal processing to detect changes (from frame-to-frame, doppler/phase detection, and months apart) that lends new info.
2) When the cars can each collect and contribute to building a shared, common picture of a place based on all their input, it won't take long to build and maintain a "map" of even the most detailed stuff (where is the tool booth? Which parking spaces are frequently empty?). But that's a lot of date to be made into knowledge, and I doubt we are near having that capability, and it wil be expensive.
3) Lots of privacy and law enforcement tie-ins to #2. License plate readers, facial recognition are already common. "Scan the Google world, provide locations of Ohio plate PGY 1234 for last 14 days. And was it ever known to be collocated with Illinois plate TRP 5678?" Will Google collect info like this? What does Google do >now< to make money? It's all publicly available for anyone to see, right? I'm not sure present Constitutional protections will pertain to this. New territory for sure.
4) If you had a self-driving car, you wouldn't have needed a parking space in the first place. Have it drive around the city for awhile. Gas and maintenance sure would have been cheaper than $3/30 minutes
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Old 11-18-2015, 09:08 AM   #153
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1 through 3) Sure, but in time. We will not be there in a few years as they promise.

4) And to cause more traffic congestion and energy wastage?


PS. I think people misunderstood when I pointed out the deficiencies of current systems. I never said that an autonomous car is impossible, only that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved before a truly smart robot car becomes a reality. So, I am not holding my breath for one. I'd rather be more excited if someone announces some lower fruit, such as inexpensive renewable energy cost so I can lower my thermostat in the summer.

In the mean time, some easier and ready options like autobraking, blindspot detection, and lane deviation warning would be welcome to become standard features in cars. These are implemented with simpler proximity sensors and vision cameras, and require no high-power onboard computers.
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Old 11-18-2015, 04:37 PM   #154
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There was an news paper article today about Google testing their cars in Austin, Texas, and how Texas did not appear to have any law against cars without human controls.

This got me thinking. How do Google's cars handle large parking lots and malls? If there are no human controls, how do they select a parking space? How do they know which door or store to park closest to? There are most likely a whole lot of other little decisions in the finale mile of a journey that would seem to need human control.
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Old 11-18-2015, 04:42 PM   #155
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... and how Texas did not appear to have any law against cars without human controls.
That explains some of the baboons I see out there behind the wheel.
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Old 11-18-2015, 08:57 PM   #156
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... This got me thinking. How do Google's cars handle large parking lots and malls? If there are no human controls, how do they select a parking space? How do they know which door or store to park closest to? There are most likely a whole lot of other little decisions in the finale mile of a journey that would seem to need human control.
I don't see that they do any of that right now, and only try to navigate the streets and avoid collision with other cars, watch out for jay walkers, bicyclists who swerve into their lane, people about to cross at a crosswalk, etc...

I can see that large shopping mall parkings, once they are mapped out, can be handled with a large touch screen showing the mall. You select where you want the car to go by pointing on the screen.

But there are so many other smaller business and residential places that must be mapped. And what to do if the map is outdated? How about you want to pull off the road to stop at a fruit stand?

And then, I see that in high-density urban areas, people run out of space and park their car part on a driveway, part on the lawn. If a car has no steering wheel, they will have to provide a way for the rider to tell the car what to do.
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Old 11-19-2015, 10:53 AM   #157
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...... If a car has no steering wheel, they will have to provide a way for the rider to tell the car what to do.
Perhaps Siri can interpret.
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Old 11-19-2015, 06:50 PM   #158
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I am not looking forward to self driving cars. Prefer them in the rear view mirror.
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Old 11-19-2015, 08:04 PM   #159
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I am not looking forward to self driving cars. Prefer them in the rear view mirror.

You may change your mind though when you can't drive anymore


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Old 11-19-2015, 10:45 PM   #160
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They can't come soon enough for me. Driving in LA Metro is a nightmare.
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