
Building a Road Map for the Self-Driving Car - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/automobiles/wheels/self-driving-cars-gps-maps.html
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aurelianito
Why would the self driving cars need better maps than humans do? After all, we
use this maps to go where we want to.

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LudoA
Yes, I'm also confused about this.

Existing maps should be enough, and LIDAR, etc. ensure that self-driving cars
can respond to road conditions in an ad-hoc manner, instead of relying on a
predefined detailed map.

The article doesn't make a good point of why this is needed. OTOH, given the
money involved in the technology & companies mentioned in the article (like
Here), I presume there must be a need for this.

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a_t48
How can a combination of existing maps/car technology and LIDAR pinpoint at
high resolution where a car is? Imagine a scenario where a car needs to merge
across two lanes of traffic and turn into an alley. The car has to be able to
plan the merges before it gets to the alley, and know that it is at the proper
place to turn. Before you say "GPS" think of how often your phone's GPS messes
up.

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badestrand
Google Maps tells me a few hundred meters in advance so the car AI can know,
too. The location does not need to be precise down to a centimeter, it should
be enough to know "the alley is somewhat near" so it can start to get into the
rightmost lane. Just as we humans do it. There are enough artifical obstacles
on the road anyway (wrongly parked cars etc).

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chrismealy
This is an admission that self-driving cars aren't going to happen. You might
as well just put them on tracks.

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a_t48
They aren't going to happen short term for consumers. The economics should
work out fine for fleet vehicles that are confined to a single well mapped
metropolitan area.

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cmsmith
>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four
million miles of roads in the United States.

I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on <0.5MM miles of roads, moreso
if they are marketing mainly to normal suburb-city commuters. And the
advantage of self driving cars isn't really in the last mile. In my commuting
days, I would have said

driving myself for 40 minutes <<< self driving car drives for 35 minutes and I
drive for 5 < self driving car drives for 40 minutes

