

Car Autonomously Powerslides Into Parking Space - mhb
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/05/11/volkswagen-and-stanfords-junior-autonomously-power-slides-int

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maukdaddy
After what seems like 10 clicks I finally found the source:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/green-tech/advanced-
cars/...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/green-tech/advanced-
cars/autonomous-car-learns-to-powerlslide-into-parking-spot)

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jasonkester
Before giving these students an A, I'm going to have to ask that they replace
the cones with their own cars. That's where you draw the line between "I think
this will work" and "I have complete confidence that this will work".

It's analogous to if I were a welder working inside a giant propane tank. The
guy with the gas meter can swear up and down that it's safe to fire up the
torch, but I'm still going to insist he stand in there beside me when I spark
up.

Besides, it just makes better video. It's not anywhere near as impressive if
there's nothing on the line.

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bad_alloc
Especially they confidently tell us, that the system is accurate to two feet.
Sadly two feet is the difference between parking ok and damaging both cars
significantly (i.e. you'll have to at least fix your bumpers.)

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mmphosis
Okay so my car Autonomously Powerslides Into a very tight Parking Space. Good
luck getting out of that same parking space.

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briancooley
The application (parking a car by powersliding) is a nice sizzle for a really
interesting (to me at least) steak.

The idea of combining closed loop model-based control for the easy-to-model
portion of a process with open-loop control for the difficult-to-model portion
of a process would have a lot of application in lots of places, but not many
people would pay attention to using the technique for, say, controlling a
distillation column.

I appreciate the nice link to a PDF I found on Mr. Kolter's website from the
link at the end of the second video:
[http://ai.stanford.edu/~kolter/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=pubs:...](http://ai.stanford.edu/~kolter/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=pubs:kolter-
icra10.pdf)

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KoZeN
It won't be long before traditional grease-monkey mechanics are replaced by
code-monkeys.

The advances in automotive technology within the last three to five years have
been staggering. I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing what cars my kids
will be driving, or not, as is the case here!

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michaelkeenan
If you'd like to learn more about how autonomous cars will change the world, I
strongly recommend the robocar essays of Brad Templeton:
<http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/>

Highlights:

-Cars that don't crash due to human error would save 40,000 lives and a million injuries (NIH). Mostly young people, for whom car accidents are the leading cause of death among major categories.

-Not crashing would save 230 billion dollars of accident cost (NTSB). About 2-3% of GDP.

-Not driving would free up 50 billion hours (or 1 trillion dollars) of people's time. Around 8% of GDP.

-Electric cars (more feasible when the car can go to a service station when it's not being used, because one of the major problems with electric cars is that storing lots of energy in a battery is difficult) would save 50 billion gallons of imported gasoline, replaced with the equivalent of 5 billion "gallons" of domestic-source power plant fuel. Thus eliminating about 12-15% of the USA's CO2 emissions and nastier pollution.

-There would be a serious reduction in the urban land devoted to the ~600 million parking spaces, estimated to be up to 10% of urban land in many cities.

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aidenn0
I thought about this though and there is a serious problem.

Let's say I've created a robo car system that is 100x less likely to be
involved in an at-fault accident. If everyone installed the system nationwide,
I would be assuming about 2.3 billion dollars (1% of the accident cost figure
quoted above) in liability.

However, that's not likely to happen since the first time such a system fails
and crashes it would be horrible publicity that would put me out of business.

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michaelkeenan
Yes, I think that will slow the adoption of robocars significantly, especially
in the USA. See Templeton's section on liability in the essay on problems with
robocars: <http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/roadblocks.html>

"[Robocars may first be adopted in] other countries, such as China, Singapore,
India or Japan. These high-tech countries have very different liability
systems, and indeed very different forms of lawmaking that can simply wipe
away the liability problem with the wave of a pen."

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dan00
In the future you have to write the better algorithm than your contender, to
get the parking space.

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roc
In that future _my car just dropped me off at the door and is going to park
itself_. Who cares if it finds a close spot? Whenever it _does_ find one, it
can tell me how much notice it needs to pick me back up.

The difference in wait between today's "good" and "bad" spots will be a couple
minutes at most. Non-issue. More interesting will be regulations regarding
drop-off/pickup-points and how much enforcement the legislation requires code
to do.

e.g. can not allow double-park. can not idle for automated pickup for longer
than X-minutes. must download list of acceptable parking zones by date. must
report every automated parking location/duration. etc

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nooneelse
Ahh someone who has thought past the surface, "can do what we currently do
better" of this to some of the more disruptive changes that autonomous car
technology might bring.

The use of the car's logs to meter all parking in a city is nice. Some new
gaming of systems will begin. The price of parking gets weighed against the
cost of just driving the car in circles for the duration of the stay, and the
defector strategies, like shifting the car between locations which have a
"cars can wait X minutes for free to do a pickup" rule, need to be watched
for.

A business model that might well feel the mixed bite of autonomous vehicles is
roadside hotel/motels. If you invest in an autonomous car with "sleeper
options" (or rent a sleeper car, bed(s) on smart wheels), any town within
about 8 hours drive becomes psychologically much closer to home, just a
night's sleep away. It becomes closer to absurd to ever stop at any hotel
between you and your destination or to take such trips so that they use your
waking time. But then hotels at the destination can cater to the "just want a
safe parking area and a shower/bathroom in the morning" crowd. Opportunities
here too for the car rental companies to provide end-to-end "sleeper car
solutions"; competition and/or cross-promotion between car rental companies
and hotels/parking-and-bathrooms chains.

Towns geographically central between large farther-flung working cities could
become hubs for meetings, think Voronoi diagram. Or they can choose, instead,
to cater to the weekend tourism crowds from those large cities. Somewhere
around Eureka California will become the easy weekend meet-up mecca for
practically the whole west coast.

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mhb
Sounds a lot like a comfortable bus. And where are those?

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nooneelse
Fair point, but it has a couple of differences which line up with the reasons
people give for not using buses, trains, and planes. Those are: no need to fit
the travel plan into the bus schedule and having a vehicle in the destination
city for no extra charge. People aren't always right when asked about their
own reasons for choosing one option over another, but I think in this case
these are important motivators as they add to the cost in terms of both money
and also the psychological "hassle" factor.

Further there are social signals sent by how one travels, and buses have let
themselves become, or targeted being, the option for low class travel (unless
it is one's personal bus, but even then it is still below the personal plane).
Autonomous cars would have the opportunity to aim their marketing toward them
being seen as a desirable, upper middle class travel option (or the un-
extravagant option for the more wealthy). The cars themselves will likely be
more expensive than cars with no autonomous capabilities, so they easily send
a signal of "well-to-do".

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mattmaroon
Does it autonomously change the tires when they go bald?

