
Roads That Work for Self-Driving Cars - chaostheory
http://www.wsj.com/articles/roads-that-work-for-self-driving-cars-1467991339
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omarforgotpwd
Really great point about cars only taking off once they paved the roads. The
government should get involved in building out infrastructure that will make
it easier for self driving cars to work better, and get the technology
production ready faster. Such an investment in next-gen infrastructure could
be a huge competitive advantage for the US economy.

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Shivetya
I guess my question is how do you denote road ways in such a way that is
detectable in all weather types without being sight pollution or requiring
external power sources. I can only figure embedding something in the road in
such a pattern that it indicates direction of travel. Yet I don't know what
can be buried that can work that doesn't require power but can be detected by
a car traveling past it.

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jessriedel
Several projects have had good results with embedded magnets:

[http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous-
cars/311...](http://www.gizmag.com/volvo-road-magents-autonomous-cars/31172/)

It wouldn't be too hard to pattern the magnets to communicate other info to
the car too, such as an upcoming sharp turn. More abstractly, magnets could
mark the car's position extremely precisely, and the car could then acquire
regularly updated info about upcoming road conditions from the internet, or a
short-range local radio broadcast.

Magnets seem very cheap compared to the cost of resurfacing. I don't
understand why we haven't been putting these in for years.

> The magnet-based system relies on magnets embedded along the center of the
> lane 1.2 meters apart to define the roadway. The car tracks the magnets with
> less than 7.5 centimeters of error. Although this requires doing something
> to the road, it is very cost-effective to spend about $10,000 per lane mile
> to buy and install the magnets compared to spending from $1 million to $100
> million per mile to build new lanes. And the life of the magnets is 30 to 50
> years -- longer than the best pavements.

[http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/97novdec/p9...](http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/97novdec/p97nov32.cfm)

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nojvek
$10000 per mile is still a huge cost. If human is able to do it then AI should
be able to do it. The cost should be no more than reprinting blurred out
lanes.

If a car can work if the roads are well marked, run it can work in many
different countries too. That's a huge boon for car makers.

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jessriedel
Whether AI can replicate all human abilities is an empirical question, not a
matter of "should". And it's clear it can't currently. Given that 30k people
per year die of preventable traffic accidents, we obviously shouldn't wait to
deploy AI until it is perfect. Adding magnets to all 160,000 miles of the US
highway system would be a one-time cost of roughly $10B, which is small in
comparison to the hundred of billion we lose _every_ year that autonomous cars
are delay.

Additionally, humans _do_ fail to keep track of lane lines in bad weather, and
this result in accidents that could be prevented if magnet-directed computers
were driving the car.

