
Ford says it conducted successful tests of driverless cars in snowy conditions - Futurebot
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35280632
======
peregrine
For anyone who's lived in areas that have regular snow storms you know that
eventually mutli-lane highways turn into single lane tracks of clear road.
Usually these tracks are somewhere in the middle of the road and everyone just
sticks to them because a semi or snow plow cleared it for us.

The method described is a really great way for car's to get stuck in snow
drifts by trying to stay in lanes. Near term drivers will PROBABLY just take
over in those situations but long term we'll probably need a combination of
Lidar and Cameras to do this type of work.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The "lane lines optional" nature of snowstorms definitely is going to require
a leap of logic I don't soon expect self-driving cars to understand.

Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the
most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't
a good ally for this use case.

~~~
peregrine
Not to mention the composition or what might be below the snow.

Snow and ice are by far the hardest conditions for anyone driving. I have no
doubt a computer can figure it out and be better eventually, until then it
will be interesting.

~~~
maxerickson
Electronic stability control is required by regulation in several
jurisdictions (US, Canada, EU now or soon). From that it can be inferred that
computers are better at some aspects of it already.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I don't know what you think ESP is but it's purely a "damage control" type of
driver aid and is only a layer of programming on top of ABS.

ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways. It's basically
automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS.

All ESP does is utilize the car's existing technology to better do what the
driver wants. It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the
wheel hard enough to use up all available traction. It keeps the vehicle in an
understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the
desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes).

The point of this is so that the "AWD means I don't actually need to know what
I'm doing people" are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer
is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he/she hits a pole he/she
hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that's good at crashing "softly"

The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant. If the used is trying
to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it's thing and the ESP code is
telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should
just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...

~~~
maxerickson
I understand what it is. It works because it can accurately estimate the
available traction. A lot of the problems drivers have in slippery conditions
boil down to not correctly estimating available traction.

------
jedberg
Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too.

Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive
in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long
time, if ever.

Honestly it's a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans
to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we
should want them.

Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up
fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy
climates.

~~~
dubcanada
The problem is with humans it's fairly clear most of the time who made the
error. It's either human 1 or human 2 99% of the time. With self driving cars
it becomes software 1 or software 2... And at that point it's extremely
difficult where to point the blame.

~~~
runamok
Why would it be harder? Most likely there will be laws to disclose telemetry,
video, etc. in the event of an accident. Most likely an audit trail of what
the sensor inputs were and what the decision made was, etc.

More likely there will just be no-fault where both parties pay unless there is
a spate of accidents that point to software/hardware issues.

------
Animats
It's not that hard. You use LIDAR to generate a topographic map of the terrain
ahead. We were doing that 10 years ago for the DARPA Grand Challenge. For off-
road driving, this is essential. A high-mounted LIDAR lets you do this. It's
not just about sensing obstacles. You profile the height of the terrain ahead,
cell by cell.

There's a range limit on terrain profiling, though, imposed by parallax and
the height of the scanner above the road. The higher, the better, of course.
For a scanner 2m above the road, you can get good profiles out to 20m or so.
This is enough to let you drive about 35- 40mph, which is enough for most
heavy snow situations.

~~~
maxerickson
How much impact do rain and snow have on the LIDAR? That seems to come up all
the time, and I've never seen a real definitive dismissal of the concern.

~~~
Animats
What you need for that is a LIDAR with "first and last". You want both the
first return and the last return. Dust, rain, snow, and fog will produce noisy
early returns, and solid terrain will produce the last return. You can also
range-gate, ignoring returns out to a certain distance, and move the range
gate in and out until you sense something solid.

LIDAR can be used to see through fog, snow, and dust to a limited
extent.[1][2][3] Better than human vision or cameras.

[1] [http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-
the-...](http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-advent-
of-low-cost-lidar/) [2] [http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-
pilots-clea...](http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clear-
line-sight-brownouts/) [3]
[http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf](http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf)

------
protomyth
"Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks
above the ground, such as buildings and road signs."

So, in order to work, it needs a mapped area. They skipped the actual problems
with driving in snowy conditions. I guess I'll have to wait a while longer for
an actual solution. At least the didn't go the full GPS route since I've been
on roads that are marked 10 yards away from their actual location.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
From my understanding, this is required of nearly all 'self-driving cars'. A
Slate article from 2014 stated that Google's cars wouldn't know a stoplight
existed, and would simply run it, if it wasn't in Google Maps. And that a
Google engineer said the level of mapping required by their cars at the time
would be 'impractical' to do at a nationwide level.

These cars require a lot more detail than traditional Google Maps data
provides. And there's a huge concern about how they'd adapt to changes in the
roadway which may have not made it to Google's servers yet.

~~~
protomyth
Its one thing, and expected, for the car to look for signs, but if self-
driving cars all need perfect maps which I didn't know was a necessity then I
don't see them being practical.

~~~
seanp2k2
Consider also: crossing guards, police pulling you or someone else over,
emergency vehicles trying to get through (possibly in traffic necessitating
that multiple cars move around to make way), drunk driver swerving into your
lane, construction lanes which route you onto the shoulder, stoplight failure
(power outage or otherwise) with and without someone directing traffic, city
parking garages where a valet parks your car in a tight grid, events where you
park in a field / on the grass (somewhere that would otherwise be "out of
bounds"), camping, some of the things schools do inside parking lots...

I just see far too many weird edge cases for car without a steering wheel to
be feasible in the next few decades. Automated driver assist, sure. Taking
over almost all the time, sure. But the dream of having it take you home drunk
/ take your kids to school without you / let you sleep on the way to work is
pretty far off IMO.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I agree, and most people don't understand the extent of parking being a huge
issue. Driveways for houses, all of it.

Though there are some edge cases companies like Google might be able to do in
the shorter term. An Uber-like service only needs to show you the closest it
is able to pick you up and drop you off, and can largely ignore the parking
nightmare entirely.

------
cschmidt
I have a Mercedes Benz with adaptive cruise control, and was driving on the
highway this weekend in a snowstorm. At one point, it basically gave up. It
gave me an error message to the effect of "you're on your own now."

It is a challenge for a human, I feel for the algorithm folks trying to test
the obscured vision.

~~~
cakes
How did the car alert you that you were on your own (I don't own a Mercedes)?
I'm curious as to how it indicates to you a rather important message about
your immediate driving situation.

~~~
cschmidt
It makes the steering wheel shake or shudder, in a way that (to me at least)
is meant to feel like hitting rumble strips at the side of the road. I think
it probably dinged as well. It also turned off the cruise control, so I
started losing speed. And there was an error message on the dashboard. So in
all, I was well informed.

------
settsu
I'm curious how this will perform in the real world since humans also cannot
see the lane markings but, unlike the system described in the article, do not
refer to stored or ad hoc environment mapping and instead operate on an
entirely improvised "lanes by consensus".

~~~
anorwell
Isn't "ad hoc environment mapping" the same thing as "lanes by consensus",
more or less?

~~~
rubidium
No. Ad hoc environment mapping seems to imply the driverless cars will map the
lanes have stored in their memory to the snowy road. Human drivers more or
less invent new lanes by consensus.

Have they tested a driverless car "push it out of a snow-bank" mode yet? :)

------
frik
"But these sensors do not work well in snowy conditions, and the car's onboard
cameras cannot see road markings obscured by snow. Ford said it had instead
programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as
buildings and road signs."

Countryside usually there is a lot more snow on the street and especially next
to the street. Detecting "landmarks" there will be hard.

Also if you combine LIDAR with stereo cameras, you will find out like Mercedes
dod in the 1980s that cameras have problems with low stand sun (light rays),
common in winter season (evening). So winter conditions will be harder to
solve.

------
rwmj
Give me a driverless car that only works on perfect sunny days, and the rest
of the time requires me to drive it manually. That's still 10 x better than
the car I have right now.

------
vadym909
Given all car makers are investing in driverless cars- why don't they install
sensors or guide-wires into roads to mark lanes, etc. the next time they are
repaving/repairing roads? won't that be much safer than having to rely on
cameras/radars .

~~~
cbhl
This has been proposed before, and the short answer is that it is too
expensive to install these things into all of the roads.

Roads are typically resurfaced only once every 15-25 years, and in many
municipalities, shrinking budgets mean that some roads are just outright being
closed rather than being maintained.

~~~
frik
More like 1-10 years. And the snow plover destroy the surface of the roads, so
you can't mount some device on the road surface or just beneath the surface.
Even the sticks net to the road get destroyed from time to time by trucks or
snow plovers.

------
theptip
Anyone happen to know why the LIDAR can't be augmented by radar or some other
frequency of light in which snow is transparent (e.g.
[http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-
fraunhofer/26844/](http://www.gizmag.com/compact-radar-fraunhofer/26844/))?

I suspect there is an issue with update frequency or spatial resolution, but
it seems like it could be a good fit for the sort of best-effort approach
described in OP.

------
eachro
Does Google test their self-driving cars outside of California/areas where
there is snow?

~~~
cfcef
Third sentence of OP: "Google has also been testing its autonomous vehicles in
the snow."

------
sandworm101
Can it dig itself out?

Can it hook up its own jumper cables?

Can it scrape the ice off all those sensors?

Can it scrape the ice off the license plate, windows, lights and everything
else needed to not get a ticket from an irate cop?

Can it stop to give a lift to a stranded person on christmas eve?

It can certainly navigate and move in snowy conditions, but I can't see it
actually driving in them.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Wow I find this really glass half full.

Firstly I can see any of these being fairly easily solvable. We're still in
the early days in this tech. It will likely take decades to really nail it.

Secondly, even if half are solved, that's half of things I would have had to
do anyway (well scraping ice of windshield instead of sensors).

Thirdly I do recognise there are issues e.g. "Ford said it had instead
programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as
buildings and road signs." This would still be problematic in heavy snow and
away from distinct fixed landmarks.

But can we just appreciate the advancements that we are seeing year on year!

~~~
sandworm101
I think you have an autopilot-type system. This is driverless. That means
nobody around. Nobody to do any of those things. So it is an all-or-nothing
game.

