
MIT shows ground penetrating radar for autonomous vehicles in snow and ice - rmason
http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/Highly-accurate-vehicle-localization-under-adverse-weather.html
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rmason
I think for those of us in the snow belt this could potentially be great news.
I first became aware of ground penetrating radar when I worked with remote
sensing in Michigan where clouds often obscured satellite photos of farm
fields. The military had the capability to look through the clouds but
unfortunately the technology never became inexpensive enough for agricultural
use.

People may not realize that when it snows the landscape dramatically changes
for the sensors on the Google cars and they can't follow the map and suddenly
they're quite literally lost.

What do you do when you can't see the lines on the road? Or when cars are
suddenly four abreast on a three lane highway? Or things like the especially
treacherous black ice. So I am encouraged that it may be possible for us in
the great white North to use our self driving cars year round.

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dmurray
> The military had the capability to look through the clouds but unfortunately
> the technology never became inexpensive enough for agricultural use.

How do the economics of this work out? It seems strange that anyone can afford
to spend tens of millions on a satellite launch, but can't afford to put
fancier equipment on the satellite. Maybe the penetrating radar apparatus is
much heavier and so more costly to launch?

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JumpCrisscross
> _Maybe the penetrating radar apparatus is much heavier and so more costly to
> launch?_

Radar is power intensive. As a commercial operator, you this weigh launch
cost, recharge time, and resolution. I've seen implementations where an hour
of charge bursts to minutes of capture.

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gene-h
This reminds me of a researcher I met, they were proposing to add a vast array
of sensors to each wheel of a military vehicle that had at minimum 8 wheels.
Every wheel would have rotation sensors, torque sensors, vibration sensors, a
camera looking ahead, a camera looking behind, lidar looking ahead, lidar
looking behind, and ground penetrating radar.

The idea being that you could know exactly what sort of terrain you were on
and what terrain you were going to hit so an active suspension could
compensate. The case of the sensors looking behind was interesting, the idea
there is that you'd measure how much you deformed the terrain to better
understand what you were moving.

Oh and said military vehicle was going to be omnidirectional with each wheel
capable of independent rotation, steering, and height change.(for the active
suspension)

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Viper007Bond
Some cars with active suspension sort of do this. The front shocks tell the
rear ones what is coming and they adjust their properties to compensate.

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hcrisp
Mercedes was apparently the first to do this with a camera in their "magic
body control" suspension system.

[http://youtu.be/ScpgI1w5F6A](http://youtu.be/ScpgI1w5F6A)

Related, hilarious Mercedes chicken ad:
[http://youtu.be/TzhLIc6c4DU](http://youtu.be/TzhLIc6c4DU)

~~~
andrewtbham
Mercedes was the first to commercialize it but Bose had an earlier
implementation and... the crazy part. It would jump over stuff.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3gX2HwFf5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3gX2HwFf5I)

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abalone
Another fine example of the role of federal military funding in high tech
research. Makes me chuckle whenever I hear a person employed in Silicon Valley
refer to themselves as a "limited-government Libertarian". We're all sucking
on the government's teat, buddy.

~~~
deelowe
I doubt there's very many libertarians that would claim the private sector
doesn't benefit from government spending at times. Every complex issue has
it's nuances.

Generally, the stance of libertarians is that the TCO associated with the
military industrial complex FAR outweigh it's benefit.

~~~
abalone
"At times" grossly understates the role of DARPA and other government support
in creating technologies commercialized by Silicon Valley. The entire industry
was a direct product of public investment and most key innovations are a
culmination of long-term sustained taxpayer-funded research.

Take for example autonomous driving. It's a product of DARPA. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge)

Even Siri on your iPhone is a result of decades of public investment in AI.
See [https://www.sri.com/work/timeline-
innovation/timeline.php?ti...](https://www.sri.com/work/timeline-
innovation/timeline.php?timeline=computing-digital#!&innovation=siri)

Need I even mention the Internet itself..

~~~
deelowe
And there are drones killing civilians in the middle east. Though we benefit
greatly in the private sector from this relationship, some of us consider the
harm it creates much greater.

I had a very interesting talk with Vint Cerf about this a while back btw. It's
a sad situation to be in.

~~~
abalone
Does he have any public comments on the matter? Would appreciate the link.

~~~
deelowe
I'm not sure. We had a good conversation of the good and bad of working with
groups like the DOD. He's happy to be with Google and recognizes the benefit
of working with the DOD, but not exactly pro military.

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jfoster
Whether this pans out or not, it is technology like this that will eventually
ensure that autonomous vehicles are far superior to flawed human drivers. The
only question is when exactly that will happen. I think everyone now knows
that it's within the next 20 years, but does that mean 1 - 2 years, or does it
mean 10 - 15 years?

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cs2818
This is very interesting work, as many weather conditions still pose big
challenges for autonomous vehicles.

I am curious about how practical it will be to maintain data for all roadways.
Though deep sub-surface features may be stable over time, it would seem the
actual roadway markings may change requiring careful updating.

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PhasmaFelis
Question: What happens if there are many cars all using this system at once?
Is this sort of radar subject to interference from nearby signals?

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mountaineer22
What if the lines never existed in the first place?

At the end of the day, it is still a human that "paints" the line on the road.

So, how would it handle this, under snow?

[http://media.nbcwashington.com/images/1232*675/restriping+wi...](http://media.nbcwashington.com/images/1232*675/restriping+wiggly+lines.jpg)

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JoBrad
I don't think it's looking at paint. It's looking for road edges.

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jonknee
This also seems like a fantastic addition to snow plows. They could even serve
as a great testing platform--still human driven, but with tons of real world
snowy road data. Fast forward a few years and autonomous snow plows will be
really nice--an army of plows working through the night and even during the
worst storms.

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jcfrei
The only scenario where I can see this failing is when snow covered lane
markings have been temporarily redrawn, eg. for nearby construction sites.
Then you have to hope for accurately placed road markers. But that would be a
similar challenge for humans as well.

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amelius
Does this mean that if you stand next to the car, you are being X-rayed? :)

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safeharbourio
:)

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tachim
> "They rely on optics to 'see' lane markings, road surface maps, and
> surrounding infrastructure to orient themselves. Optical systems work well
> in fair weather conditions, but it is challenging, even impossible, for them
> to work when snow covers the markings and surfaces or precipitation obscures
> points of reference."

Humans drivers are a pretty glaring counterexample.

~~~
eru
Humans are challenged, too.

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analog31
Just a thought, could autonomous cars be programmed to eliminate the need for
road salt?

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ams6110
Seems extraordinarily complicated.

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CamperBob2
Not really -- it's a straightforward and obvious application of image
correlation. Nothing exotic about the hardware, either.

It certainly shouldn't have been patented. The first claim is as broad as a
barn, basically giving MIT ownership of an entire problem space.

~~~
ams6110
I didn't really mean the technology itself, more the logistics of actually
making it work at scale.

Something like an embedded wire in the centerline of each lane that could be
followed by a simple metal detector seems a lot simpler.

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Animats
That's how GM did automatic driving for Firebird II and III in the 1960s.

Volvo's solution for snow is to drive magnets in the form of nails into the
pavement along lane centerlines. They suggest that this can provide guidance
for snowplows as well as assist autonomous vehicles.

Lane marking in areas of heavy snow is hard. Some areas put up plastic posts
along the roadside. Japan puts up arrows hanging over the road in parts of
Hokkaido.

