
The autonomous Google car may never happen - rsgoheen
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.single.html
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tfinniga
The conclusion about map generation is a bit naive. Yes, if google's self-
driving car requires them, and google can't currently produce them at scale,
then maybe google's current solution isn't going to explode onto the
marketplace. But could the current solution be used in certain cities? (start
with San Francisco, then expand city by city as the demand exists) Sure. Could
google come up with a different solution? Sure.

There are other companies working on self-driving cars - BMW, Audi, Tesla,
others. The darpa grand challenges in 2005 and 2007 didn't rely on this kind
of detailed map data.

Will self-driving cars ever be able to handle all possible driving situations?
Probably not. But humans can't handle all driving situations either. A more
relevant question is whether self-driving cars will be better than human
drivers. It's silly to say that we need strong AI for that, since we've
already seen several prototype systems that do better than humans in many
situations without strong AI.

The other thing that this conclusion ignores is what the changes to the road
system might be. If everyone gets semi-autonomous cars for commuting, and they
work fine except for one intersection where people need to pay attention and
negotiate it themselves, then there will be pressure to change the
intersection. Maybe besides the carpool lane, you might eventually get
autonomous lanes. It's a bit chicken-and-egg, but if there is a system that is
useful enough in some situations for people to buy, then it will progress from
there.

~~~
reddytowns
The main point is still valid. In an emergency situation, as long as a self
driving car has to choose between hitting a ball and a kid chasing after it,
or a woman and a shopping cart, or a laid down motorcycle and its rider, and
not know which is which, there is no way these cars can be deployed in mass.
And this is an extremely hard problem.

~~~
tfinniga
In an emergency situation, just stop. Don't hit the ball or the kid. Let the
human take over, or wait for the emergency to pass. The car will break faster
than a human could. If the car can't drive itself safely in a given situation,
make humans drive.

There are valid points to be made about liability and legal concerns,
increases in road congestion, etc. But technical considerations are not really
an issue.

You don't need to completely solve all potential problems before entering the
market. You just need to provide enough value.

If you've got an hour commute over highways every day, even being able to do
highway driving automatically will be a huge win.

~~~
marvy
That's usually the right answer, but you have to be careful. For instance, you
say the car will break faster than a human could. But if it does, the human-
driven car right behind it is in trouble.

~~~
tfinniga
Yes, you'd want to have some sort of sensors behind the car as well, so that
if it's possible to avoid hitting the object and avoid being hit by the car
that you would brake at that speed. If it's not possible, well, it's still an
improvement over a human driver.

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neals
Coming from Europe, I can see self driving cars work in the USA, your roads
are just so big and... well "easy" to navigate. Now come to Europe. Narrow
winding roads, no grid system in cities, lots one way traffic, uneven 'brick'
roads, blocked often by wrongly parked cars, thousands of bicycles.

I have a hard time navigating here myself. A lot has to change before the
automatons take of the streets :(

~~~
Vivtek
And yet the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (Hungarian Scientific Academy) is doing
exactly this kind of research in self-driving cars, in Budapest. Self-driving
cars could ultimately be far safer than human drivers in adverse situations,
especially since a self-driving car will never be surprised by a one-way
street.

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lifeformed
I'd be fine with a car that was automated only on highways. I could drive
manually on local routes, and then for big journeys I would just head on the
highway and turn on autopilot and take a nap, and wake up the next morning in
Yellowstone or something.

It seems like standardizing information about just highways would be
magnitudes easier than getting every single local route right. Companies could
work with the government to standardize traffic and construction
pylons/signals to be ideal for detection by robot cars. Traffic, construction,
weather, and accident information for highways could all be standardized.

~~~
thebiglebrewski
THIS THIS THIS. Why is no company working on this? This really seems like it
could already be here...just use the HOV lanes!

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hokkos
Wow, I never knew you had to have a 3D map of the road you wanted to use and
it was so much a hassle, first time I read it after so many articles on the
subject, I feel a little cheated.

~~~
bonzoq
A friend of mine working for Delphi Automotive (electronics supplier for car
makers) recently told me that the google's autonomous vehicle needs exact 3D
maps, and at that time I found it hard to believe. Watching Eric Schmidt's
youtubes you get the impression like the technology is already there for the
car to drive everywhere in the US. Coast to coast distance is 3000 miles as
oppossed to 700.000 the car has already driven.

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nowarninglabel
I don't really buy the crux of the argument much, which basically boils down
to the idea that the car will have trouble with unmapped objects. I would be
pretty surprised if all these cars didn't come equipped with an ability to
phone home and update the central repository of maps with newfound objects.
Thus, when encountering a new object the car could slow down, devote some
processing power to mapping it, and then cars traveling through the area in
the future should get the latest update downloaded and can handle the
previously unmapped object automatically.

If you think about it, it's a really fun problem to get to solve, wish I was
working on it.

~~~
kijin
I agree that "never" is a pretty strong word to use in the context of
computing. But I don't think what you described is the most interesting or
difficult aspect of the problems that remain.

We're talking about a car, not a mobile phone. It's a 3000-pound chunk of
metal that moves fast enough to kill anyone who comes into contact with it,
and sometimes even those who ride in it. The ability to consult with a remote
server would be nice, but the car should perform just as well even when a
neighborhood prankster jams the cell & GPS signals.

So the entire approach of relying on a map might be misguided, regardless of
whether the map is precompiled or JIT-crowdsourced. It seems that the current
generation of autonomous vehicles rely too much on maps and too little on
situational awareness. The next generation will need to make a lot of advances
on the latter. Ideally, a car should be able to make all millisecond-by-
millisecond decisions by itself, offline if necessary, and use the map only as
a hint.

~~~
sebdiem
And google's approach is not the only one that scientists are exploring at the
moment. Some are relying on more "reactive" strategies see e.g. Professor
Alberto Broggi's work with the university of Parma
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Broggi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Broggi)).
His vehicle doesn't make use of such an heavy map as the one used by Google.

What I liked in this article is that it reveals to the public that google's
communication on the topic is really skewed. They try to make people think
that the problem of autonomous driving is basically solved while many big
challenges remain.

~~~
yen223
To be fair, most of the hype around the self-driving car don't come from
Google, they come from people who are ... let's just say enthusiastic but who
lack exposure in the subject matter.

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lbsnake7
I always wondered if it was possible to have a dedicated autonomous car lane
on the highway, similar to a HOV lane. To get on, you would park your car at a
designated area. The computer would start to sync with all the other cars
traveling in the lane, and it would take off and just add itself to the
caravan of cars. You could go to sleep or do whatever else you wanted. When
you reached your destination exit, the car would park itself again and wait
for you to resume control of the car for the local streets.

You still have to deal with things mentioned in the article: random objects on
the road, rain, sunlight, human driven cars crashing into your lane. But I
think that's more manageable then having to deal with humans crossing the
street, stop signs and traffic signals, random road changes in the middle of
the night.

~~~
FranOntanaya
A lot of toll highways in Spain are severely underused and basically bankrupt.
They definitely could devote a whole lane to autonomous cars.

~~~
agumonkey
What a nice testbed too. Google should leverage this kind of failed states.

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verytrivial
Liability, lawsuits, litigation, lawyers. The future of autonomous cars is not
limited by engineering smarts. The future of the industry will come down to
how punitive the jury feels when Google Inc. dragged before the courts after a
Google vehicle kills people. And these vehicles will, of course, kill people.
But I don't see the "they statistically kill LESS people" argument working
against "a machine made by Google ran over my children." Someone needs to be
sueable, right?

~~~
DanBC
An Uber driver attacked a passenger with a hammer. Another driver ran over
some people. Neither of these events have had any appreciable effect on Uber.

T'll be interestin to see how the public reacts when a Google autonomous car
kills someone.

And so many people currently use Google services I wouldn't be surprised if
people have already died as a result of something Google has done.

~~~
verytrivial
In the Uber case you can sue _the driver_. So when deep-pocketed Google is the
driver, I wouldn't be surprised to see people throwing themselves under the
vehicles. (If anyone is about to retort with "webcams!" you're missing my
point. _Someone_ needs to be sued. If Google convinces law makers to enact
laws to endemify them, then the State will be sued first, then Google.)

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netcan
Self driving vehicles are a new transport paradigm, potentially. The
trajectory of these things is complicated with all sorts of intertwined
positive feedbacks between technology, infrastructure, preceding technologies
and succeeding technologies.

Roads were built for oxcarts. They followed routes used by donkey trains which
followed paths used by walkers who followed pre existing animal runs wherever
they could. The width of road cars and train tracks were based on the width of
old roads. Shipping containers were designed to fit on trains and trucks.
Ships were built to handle shipping containers, as are ports, depots and such.
If you want to use something other than a standard shipping container, you
probably need to design it to fit in to the shipping container world. It can
all be traced back to wild goats making a path from one place to another.

The development os self driving cars as a major mode of transport depends on
the development of stuff around it. Infrastructure is probably the big one.
Our roads are built for human drivers in standard cars. If when roads start
getting features designed specifically for robots, the whole thing could
accelerate. I don't just mean physical infrastructure of roads, but maybe the
whole ruleset and/or economics of it.

Many old cities have a problem with 10 sq Kms of inner city traffic. Some ban
or limit vehicles here. But, if people use robo taxis instead of cars, these
inner cities can have different vehicles. Instead of big cars that must deal
with trucks and highways perhaps inner cities can be handled by slower,
lighter and safer like vehicles like golf carts. This might help solve some
safety issues.

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jfoster
"The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

Directly underneath that, an image captioned: "A Google self-driving car
maneuvers through the streets of Washington in 2012."

This article is rubbish. It makes lots of arguments that sound valid, but are
actually nowhere near being insurmountable. Take the first one, for instance.
Supposedly, the need to map the roads is a huge burden. Well, what if they
just design the cars so that when a road is unmapped they need to be manually
driven, but after that has been done a certain number of times, can be driven
on that road autonomously? Only a tiny proportion of drivers would even
encounter that situation, and even new roads would become autonomous-
compatible from day one. (or thereabouts)

Overall, the article acknowledges that varying degrees of autonomy are already
being built into vehicles. To not come to the conclusion that these will be
iterated on and become (more or less) full autonomy is short-sighted.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g)

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xfs
All the effort is spent for safety. But is it worth it? The fully autonomous
approach may never make Google's self-driving car economically viable to reach
the same level of human driving safety. Note that humans are actually decent
drivers. WHO reports 7.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle km in the US. Now
Google's self-driving car has reached 1 million km, and that's under ideal
conditions and human monitoring. If it wants proper validation of the safety
of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving,
which would cost much much more than a lot of low hanging fruits of
improvement at driving safety (autobraking, obstacle radar, auto lane keeping
etc).

Now that you can see a slow version of self-driving car already out there with
25 mph top speed and impossible to cause serious injury in the first place.
This might be the future of self-driving cars, to provide accessibility and
enable those who can't drive.

~~~
aylons
> If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it
> requires at least several billion miles of driving

No, it doesn't, the same way we don't need decades of testing to build an
edifice or centuries of flying to test an airplane. Actually, as every human
driver is literally a different person, by your logic we would need driving
tests enduring several billion miles.

We can make tests using the worst situations, corner cases and even simulated
accidents to see how the driving AI reacts. The problem is hard, but
engineering is a finer art than what you imply.

~~~
xfs
Note that I was comparing with Google's methods of testing self-driving cars:
idle roads, good weather, precision maps, human monitoring, no accidents. If
Google's miles of safe driving mean anything, if means it has 99% more miles
left before a level of validation. If you look at it for the effective miles
where actual accident recovery happens, it will be much much shorter.

And yes, UMich/Ford's self-driving car project is making a testing field
specifically designed for increased hazardous environment. But that
environment is always artificial, and the hard part is to catch the last 1%
situations, or the last 0.000001% in order to reach a level of billion miles
safe record, because you don't even know what those are.

Autonomous navigation is fancy on all side (Yes I do this research), but all
field experts know any security audit can probably reveal a bunch of failure
modes because nobody has really worked on making it robust again adversaries.

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pinkyand
They forget that Google also own a high resolution satellite company and
they're working on a drone project - all which could be very useful for real
time mapping.

About parking, this is less important for a taxi company.

And the incentives for self driving cars are huge , even as regional taxi
companies, so connecting the traffic lights into the net(read only) as backup
doesn't seem like a big problem.

The real interesting question is: does it really need "generalized
intelligence" , or all the examples the article mentioned could be coded
decently enough on a case by case basis, to a point where self driving car is
much safer than a car ? We don't yet know the answer, but the current safety
of Google's car are promising in that regard.

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Vivtek
Instead, it will simply be the autonomous BMW, Volkswagen, or Daimler. Or
Tesla. It's not as though Google is the only company in the world working on
autonomous driving. They're just the only one the American tech media has
noticed.

~~~
ars
You didn't read the article did you?

There is no reason to assume those European companies have solved this problem
anymore than Google has. They most likely will come up with the exact same
"solution" with the same limitations.

~~~
Vivtek
No. I know what the Europeans are actually researching. Google seems usually
to think in terms of the knowledge they gain from universal data availability.
Driving, to Google, is an outgrowth of mapping.

The Europeans are looking at a scaled approach of driver assistance. There are
cases where automation is already making driving safer and easier, on the road
_right now_ in production cars. It's a much more holistic and interesting
approach, and while it will make use of data if available, it's not locked
into it.

So no, they're not coming up with "the solution" \- they're coming up with a
wide variety of solutions, with much fewer limitations in the aggregate.

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r3m6
I thought the key point of Googles new tiny & _slow_ self-driving car is that
it is so slow, that "just stopping" is the adequate solution to _all_
unforeseen issues. This would give the driver enough time to wake up & take
over. (Or someone does it remotely). And really, from all issues that might be
open, I am sure that traffic lights are a solved problem. How hard would it be
to pass a law that requires all (mobile) traffic lights to send out some
radio-signal to communicate with self-driving cars? Such an emergency stop
signal would also be useful for human-driven cars.

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rwmj
You don't need a map of the whole world/country in order to operate a regional
taxi service. Nor do you need intelligence for parking (except in the taxi
garage - which can be done by humans if necessary). You just need a smaller
map of the region that the taxi will operate in, and the ability to "phone
home" when it sees new objects in the map (which can be analyzed by humans /
really big computers and added to the map in real time).

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fuckTheMeta
Yeah, four years ago, we totally didn't have driverless cars!
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/27/driverless.car...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/27/driverless.car/)

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tonydiv
General object recognition will help with nearly all of these challenges. The
technology is far from perfect, but every year, the needle moves.

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BerislavLopac
In the immortal words of the (quite literally) immortal Treebeard: "Never is
too long a word even for me."

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magicalist
The level of new insight this article provides is summed up well by the author
quoting a _comment_ on someone else's article[1] about the challenges self
driving cars face before the second paragraph is through.

[1] [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-
obstacles...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles-
for-googles-self-driving-cars/)

~~~
whyenot
> someone else's article

Lee Gomes is the author of both articles.

