

Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants. - maeon3
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116899029375914044550/posts/MVZBmrnzDio
We wanted to share one of our favorite moments from some special research we conducted. Watch this video of Steve, who joined us for a drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment outside of our core research efforts, but we think it’s also a promising look at what this kind of technology may one day deliver for society if rigorous technical and safety standards can be met. 
======
fruchtose
That should be,"Google's self driving cars can navigate drive through
restaurant _drive-throughs_." Although I am highly impressed by Google's self-
driving cars, I can't help but feel a little bit let down that the car did not
navigate around tables, make way for waiters, or squeeze through tight spaces.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Actually the video doesn't show the car navigating through the drive through
space, it shows it driving up to the speakers and stopping, then it cuts to a
scene from the restaurant where he's ordering, then it cuts to a scene where
the car is leaving the parking lot.

As a robotics junky all my red flags went off with that bit of creative
editing.

Even if the car spent 10 minutes working out the close quarters navigation it
would be more 'real' than the editing which makes me suspicious that the 'side
seat' driver actually did that tricky bit of navigating.

Not hating on the Goog here, just really looking forward to the era of self
driving vehicles but want to be realistic about their capabilities.

~~~
sad_panda
There's quite a bit of footage of the self driving car making its way through
congested areas with people and obstacles. It was more competent than many of
the minivan drivers in my neck of the woods. :)

~~~
bdonlan
Got a link to that footage?

~~~
magicalist
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk>

9:00 has a good example, recognizing the state of a traffic light, other cars
and pedestrians at an intersection, but lots of cool videos starting around
3:40. The whole talk is awesome and a presentation for an actual technical
audience, too.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is a great video, my observation is a bit different.

The process by which the car figures out what to do to achieve a goal requires
a system for 'working backwards' from where it wants to be, and where it is.
This is called 'inverse kinematics.' The more constraints you put on the path
planner, the harder it is to do the plan, in fact my experience with my own
robots is that the challenge goes up super-linearly at best and exponentially
at worst.

In the situations in the video linked above the vehicle can often simply wait
and the path options will change until there is one it can execute. But in a
drive through there is a fixed route through tight constrictions where non-
organic visibility is complex at best (lots of reflections / structures) and
opaque at worst.

Cars that can parallel park themselves show that the problem can be solved for
a given set of constraints (I actually think parallel parking is easier in
this case) but the generalized solution is at least an order of magnitude
above that.

Now please don't get me wrong, I have deep and wide respect for what these
guys have accomplished. I want them to be successful. And solving the case of
navigating into and through a drive up window (restaurant or bank for that
matter) is a solid advancement in the area of self-driving transport. And
making a video to show it off is a cool thing too.

Except they didn't show it.

And that is what bugged me. There is lots of video showing the car driving
through traffic, and as magicalist shows video of it driving through crowded
streets, and now we get a video about 'going through the drive-thru' and _it
doesn't show the car navigating itself through the drive-thru lane._ We are
left to imagine it.

Unfortunately for Google, this is a well known technique that film makers used
for a shot that is either too expensive or impractical to shoot. They set up
the theme, they show the characters starting toward and action, then a quick
shot of them in the middle of that action, and then a shot of them exiting the
action. They leave it to our fertile imaginations to 'fill in the rest.' And
it is a great story telling technique.

But if you're talking about a real self driving car, and you say it can
navigate these very difficult driving situations (and anyone who does robotics
will immediately go "Whoa, that is a tough challenge.") then you use the film
makers trick of not actually showing anything. Well its kinda like a research
paper that doesn't include any supporting data. It looks like a publicity
stunt and that Google is whoring out the research for some sort of 'feel good'
brand buffing. I don't think that was where they intended to go with that
spot.

------
anigbrowl
Unmentioned in the article is that 'Steve' is Daniel Steve Mahan, who's 95%
blind. He's CEO of the Santa Clara Blind Center:
<http://www.visionbeyondsight.org/About-Staff.htm>

~~~
lusr
"We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more
enjoyable, and more efficient."

OK so Google Labs is shut down and Google starts charging for various APIs but
decides the world needs to be a better place so invests into this? I'm
skeptical (even though I think this is AWESOME). What's the real story here?

Is it the extra eyeball time they get by having self-driving cars? Whereas in
the past people would spend 20-60 minutes, or more, concentrating exclusively
on driving each day, they could now spend that time online? I guess growth at
Google is difficult when you're already the most popular search engine in the
world and there's a fixed 24 hour day, the best you can do is change the % of
that time people spend online, and implicitly, using your search engine. No
doubt the front-end will feature Internet connectivity with a Google portal.

~~~
dmnd
I'm confused by your comment. Do you really think self driving cars cannot be
monetized?

~~~
lusr
Now I'm confused. Where did I say it can't be monetized? I quoted a statement
from Google that makes it sound like they're investing in this out of the
goodness of the hearts. I'm asking if anybody knows what their actual plans
are for monetizing it.

~~~
shrikant
I don't _know_ , but that doesn't stop me from speculating..

1\. Licensing fees from manufacturers for the patents, designs, etc. [once the
tech is street-ready and approved]

2\. Contextual/location-based ads as you drive around?

~~~
ROFISH
Lost man-hours of Google employees driving to/from work.

------
joejohnson
How did they tell the car to stop in front of the speaker (in the drive thru)?
And how did they signal to the car that they were done ordering and to go to
the pick-up window? The video conveniently skips those sequences.

~~~
barrkel
"a drive on a carefully programmed route" - given careful enough programming,
this appears to allow for an indefinite amount of smoke and mirrors specific
to this demo.

~~~
jessriedel
To be fair, it would be easily worth it for a blind person to spend a few
hours carefully programming important routes like this. And of course, when
self-driving cars are widely adopted, Taco Bell will automatically make
instructions available. (This could be as simple as a standardized sign
denoting the entrance and two windows of a drive through.)

~~~
electromagnetic
> This could be as simple as a standardized sign denoting the entrance and two
> windows of a drive through.

3/4 of McDonalds and other restaurants I go through already have signage, road
markings, etc. for the drive through. Even some of the McDonalds I've been
through have signs in the windows saying "Window 1" and "Window 2" (why this
is necessary for humans of an age and intellect capable of driving a car, but
apparently the ability to count windows does not have an impact on motor
vehicular ability).

It really wouldn't be much difficulty for the companies to standardize these
signs as most already use their own anyway.

~~~
jeffool
I can't tell you how many times I've been told to "drive to the first window"
only to sit there for a couple of minutes before realizing they meant the
second window I encounter. It may seem stupid... But better safe than annoyed,
I suppose.

I just hate the "drive up and we'll bring it to you" bit.

------
fudged
Driving seems to be the only daily activity in which a large population of
people need to abide by a set of logic and rules to _not die_ and not get hit
by a big financial burden in the case of an accident or ticket. Recently I've
found myself wondering if society would degrade if we lost our dependance on
this sort of necessary logic in our daily lives.

~~~
electromagnetic
I not only drive to and from work, but because I'm in construction I also
spend a portion of my day driving either to the job site or between job sites,
often hauling a trailer that weighs over double what my truck does.

Just this morning I had a woman swearing at me and giving me the finger, with
her two small children in the vehicle, because I abided by the 4-way stop
outside an elementary school and she tried to run it.

Between the cell phone users, and the middle aged women in their SUV's that
can't do a shoulder check or read a single lane sign, and the guy with the
chronic one-upsman syndrome who guns it to 30 over the limit just to pass you
on the highway and go slightly under the limit.

IMO only about 20% of people on the road actually follow the rules because
they know they're right and help keep them and their passengers safe. Then
there's probably another 60% who generally follow the rules simply because
they don't want to get a ticket. The last 20% just don't give a shit, do what
they want, when they want and god forbid they don't get it.

I'd also say there's an additional 10-30% who are purely seasonal drivers
known the other 7-9 months as "cyclists". They only come out in the winter,
and are likely responsible for as many if not more accidents than inclement
weather. Living in southern ontario I actually dread the roads on that first
heavy snow because, no joking around, I'm actually worried I'm going to kill
someone and it won't be my fault.

I don't think driving is doing society any good except at providing a way for
the stupid, and the stupidly unfortunate, ways out of the genetic pool.

~~~
mindslight
Are you really saying that many cyclists who switch to driving in the winter
are characteristically terrible drivers? This is just really at odds with my
cycling experience - A biker always needs to be on the defensive just based on
the fact that the average driver is likely to not even perceive a smaller
vehicle. Even though I haven't seriously biked in several years, I'm still
generally aware of what most cars are going to do before they actually do it.
(Then again, I guess I've also seen my share of moronic bikers - the kind that
think they don't really need to think about what they're doing as long as
they're doing it slowly). The first snow is indeed always a mess of bad
drivers, but I blame that on people forgetting how slippery snow really is.

~~~
electromagnetic
It's not so much the snow, it's that the cyclists disappear when it starts
getting near freezing, which is the exact time you get a bunch of awful
drivers on the road.

I don't mean to say all bikers are bad drivers, I'm just saying the
correlation between the two events (the absence of cyclists from the roadways
and the new presence of masses of bad drivers) is uncanny.

There's always the bad cyclists that just scare the crap out of you, like the
60-70 year old man who's wobbling about 2 feet from side to side, essentially
rendering the bike lane useless. But in my experience as a driver, I've only
seen a handful - and by handful I mean one or two - cyclists that actually
obey the rules of the road. I see them run red lights and stop signs, I see
them go on the side walk to cut past cars to make a right turn. etc

------
rdl
I followed one of these on US101N the other day, near Mountain View. It was
one of the better drivers on the road, although it was an easy driving
environment.

I have to admit I wanted to be a dick to it (tailgate, brake check, etc) to
see what it would do. I wonder if anyone has crashed into one yet.

------
dawie
The car does a pretty average parking job in the dude's driveway at the end of
the video..

------
brownbat
Much better than my ad for Google Driverless cars:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2SBX2nnUw>

(Warning: Link is to a near endless string of awful car crashes with sad music
in the background. Cannot be unseen.)

~~~
barefoot
> Cannot be unseen*

*[http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/the...](http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/the-forgetting-pill)

------
erikpukinskis
When Google wants to put these into the market, they should run ads with video
of the cars in extremely dangerous situations.

Imagine watching a video of a robot car navigating coolly and safely, with
split-second timing in the midst of a snowy 12 car pileup involving an
18-wheeler. That'd sell the things as a public good.

------
jhaile
My biggest question was how the car knew when to stop at the window and when
to continue driving. Wish the video had shown that.

------
ck2
How does it do on rainy days and at night?

~~~
CountHackulus
To say nothing of snow.

~~~
jonknee
Cars are already better at navigating snow by themselves than with people at
the [direct] controls. Traction control and drive by wire are common.

~~~
themonk
True, but car can't see lane marks and can't even recognize where the road is
once it is covered in snow.

~~~
jonknee
Neither can people, but computers have the ability to see through the dark,
rain and snow. They have the benefit of GPS. They have the benefit of being
able to work with embedded sensors in the roadway (which to be fair is in its
infancy, but you know that's where it's going).

I like people a lot, but I would not bet on a person driving better than a
computer. Our reaction time is way too slow and sensory input very limited.

------
juiceandjuice
All I could think of when I saw this were the jokes about McDonald's having
braille for their drive through window.

------
sad_panda
I thought that the title was a typo, and I was imagining a Prius navigating
straight on through the glass windows of a strip mall restaurant. The reality
is safer, but less hilarious.

------
zht
there's quite a lively discussion on the driving prowess of middle aged Asian
women going on there

