Video: Google’s self-driving car meets cyclists and out-performs far too many human drivers

allez neg wrote:

Cars by a computer company. Computers don't crash much, do they?

I think there'd definitely be the odd crash. But at the moment people crash all the time- I'm pretty sure computers will generally do a far better job than people do so I'm all for it.

allez neg wrote:

Cars by a computer company. Computers don't crash much, do they?

There's always one!

Home computers crash because they are not subject to strict quality control on both hardware and software levels. But the bulk of problems are down to user error and expectation.

If a driverless car malfunctioned the vehicle would stop (as safely as possible) and call for assistance. Meanwhile it's onboard comms would be alerting all nearby vehicles and the smart signalling network that is was stuck so they could dynamically reroute traffic to minimise disruption.

Failsafes would be built in to minimise the impact of a failure, this is done at module level from a very early stage in the design process for all automotive components already and autonomous systems would likely be even more stringent to start with.

allez neg wrote:

Cars by a computer company. Computers don't crash much, do they?

I don't think they are suggesting running this stuff on Windows Vista or something. Safety-critical systems don't crash that often, and when they do, good design will bring everything to a halt without killing anyone.

allez neg wrote:

Cars by a computer company. Computers don't crash much, do they?

Aircraft auto pilots.

Next.

mrmo wrote:

allez neg wrote:

Cars by a computer company. Computers don't crash much, do they?

Aircraft auto pilots.

Next.

With the caveat of course that a pilot is still ultimately overseeing the flight and can override the autopilot at any point.

The more intelligent flight control system revolve around several system developed indepently using different method and decisions are made by majority decision. Very clever until all systems come up with entirely different intentions.

SB76 wrote:

With the caveat of course that a pilot is still ultimately overseeing the flight and can override the autopilot at any point.

The more intelligent flight control system revolve around several system developed indepently using different method and decisions are made by majority decision. Very clever until all systems come up with entirely different intentions.

Autopilot systems in planes are indeed very clever, but they don't come up with different intentions as you suggest relative to human intent.

In aircraft and cars, there are 3 primary causes of crashes; navigational error, mechanical failure or operator error. Mechanical failure per the autopilot system malfunctioning is extremely rare compared to pilot intervention (Air France and, likely, Malaysian Airlines).

Looking at the road, operator error is extremely common (running red lights, DUI, texting friends, etc). Reducing this through automated cars would result in a significant decrease in the accident and mortality rate of vehicle accidents, and it's extremely unlikely that we'd see the accident rate being commensurately replaced by autopilot operational error.

coldbeer wrote:

Stop this nonsense, if vehicles become driverless what would road.cc forum members have to chunter on about?

Hipsters. The bastards. And horses.

bikebot wrote:

We will however see more and more of this kind of technology appearing in private cars as safety features. The cars won't drive themselves, but they will actively intervene to prevent an accident.

They already do. VW has an "anti-accident" function. OK, it only works at certain speeds. But, it's out there. And Mercedes (I think) have had a car take a drive under its own initiative - well, they gave it a destination and let the Sat Nav do it.

I suppose that's my current concern: sat nav isn't accurate enough. Take a look at your Garmin / Strava / whatever traces of your rides to see how they wiggle all over the road. OK, a dedicated car-based sat nav should be better. But, how many times do we hear man drives into lake following sat nav, or some such nonsense?

In summary, not sure.

bikebot wrote:

It's going to be some years yet before we get true self drive cars, but it'll probably mark a further shift away from private car ownership.

The commercial carpools that are becoming increasingly popular in our cities start making even more sense when the cars can also drive themselves. Need a car for a few hours to go and buy something big and bulky (your latest n+1 bike of course...). No need to walk to the collection point, just book it by phone and wait for one to drive itself to your door!

Why would anyone spend a large chunk of their income on a private car when you can hire one just for the time you need it with all the convenience of a chauffeur as well. Carpool and taxi essentially merge, with Google's brain replacing the cabbie.

It'll be interesting to see how Google will eventually sell or license this technology, but I suspect they'll do something disruptive rather than just sell it to the car manufacturers.

We will however see more and more of this kind of technology appearing in private cars as safety features. The cars won't drive themselves, but they will actively intervene to prevent an accident.

To be honest, car companieshave been looking into this, it's just Google want to advertising. The sensor application behind it wont be google developed so i cant see any chance for google to create a disruptive technology.

SB76 wrote:

To be honest, car companieshave been looking into this, it's just Google want to advertising. The sensor application behind it wont be google developed so i cant see any chance for google to create a disruptive technology.

It's not the technology that's disruptive, it's the business model.

Correct, at the moment the technology is being developed by several car companies and Google. As the car companies are also developing the tech, Google obviously isn't producing it for licensing revenue.

Car companies are in the business of selling as many cars as possible, Google isn't.

Do you start to see how that might be enormously disruptive?

SB76 wrote:

I know some drivers are bad but i'm amazed that the comments so far for self-driving cars are positive.

To some extent, the thought scares the life out of me whilst another bit of me quite likes the idea.

I do not think this these self drive cars are imminent. Just like the google drone deliveries, bit of a gimmick designed to grab headlines.

Any such move would come with an awful lot of safety systems/testing before any governemnt would accept it on the road and rightly so.

it's definitely coming. All the manufactures are working hard on this. Several already have working demo systems. Legislation is already being discussed in Europe and the US. It will probably be on the roads far quicker than you might expect. As seen in this video they have the potential to be far safer than an existing human controlled vehicle. When the technology matures the legislation may switch the other way and make 'manual' cars very highly regulated

I know it's coming, i've seen some of the kit developed by small tech companies for the car companies wrt collision avoidance.
Some really good stuff already getting deployed on high branded cars to will deploy breaks/produce audible warning in the event of collision detection. Very, very clever stuff espcially considering how poor reverse sensors can be.

I know it's coming, i've seen some of the kit developed by small tech companies for the car companies wrt collision avoidance.
Some really good stuff already getting deployed on high branded cars to will deploy breaks/produce audible warning in the event of collision detection. Very, very clever stuff espcially considering how poor reverse sensors can be.

SB76 wrote:

I do not think this these self drive cars are imminent. Just like the google drone deliveries, bit of a gimmick designed to grab headlines.

I disagree. Google have spend considerable time and resources in research and development on this, as well as political lobbying for laws to be passed allowing the cars to drive on public roads.

The Amazon drone deliveries, as far as I know, is nothing more than words.

Driverless cars are coming, sooner than you might think, IMO.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

Don't all get excited. Believe it when you see it.

SB76 wrote:

I know some drivers are bad but i'm amazed that the comments so far for self-driving cars are positive.

Any such move would come with an awful lot of safety systems/testing before any governemnt would accept it on the road and rightly so.

How much thought do you give to the fact that pilots very rarely fly aircraft?

It's already legal to road test self-drive cars in various jurisdictions. Presumably they have to have a human driver and dual controls. I'd be surprised if they aren't legal somewhere within ten years and compulsory within thirty.

Personally I can't wait. Computers are much better at things like driving than humans. If people still want to drive around themselves then there should be a massively extended test and instant bans for all minor infractions.

ollieclark wrote:

It's already legal to road test self-drive cars in various jurisdictions. Presumably they have to have a human driver and dual controls. I'd be surprised if they aren't legal somewhere within ten years and compulsory within thirty.

Personally I can't wait. Computers are much better at things like driving than humans . If people still want to drive around themselves then there should be a massively extended test and instant bans for all minor infractions.

That's highly debatable.

They haven't done enough miles yet to know if they're safer to all on average.
They get driven in the easiest roads for computers to understand.
Google naturally shows us clips of when they did well, even then, they couldn't tell the difference between 1 cyclist and 2 cyclists.
Knowing what mistakes humans make is easy to account for as a cyclist, but god only knows when a google-car would mistake a shadow or a plastic bag as something to avoid and make some crazy move to avoid it.
Watch the video again, the car doesn't see clearly, it's seeing some amorphous blobs, it can't tell a cyclist from a horse, it can't tell which way a car is facing. The technology has a long way to go.
The google cars have had backup humans who have had to take control of the cars a few times, this means the tech isn't yet ready.

This doesn't mean I wouldn't like driverless cars, I just think the tech needs to be better.

Worst case scenario for cycling: less deaths overall due to massively less passenger deaths, more pedestrian, cyclist and horse rider deaths. /devils advocate

kie7077 wrote:

The technology has a long way to go.
The google cars have had backup humans who have had to take control of the cars a few times, this means the tech isn't yet ready.

This doesn't mean I wouldn't like driverless cars, I just think the tech needs to be better.

Well, yeah- it's years away from being ready, nobody's saying otherwise. But I wouldn't bet against it progressing pretty quickly.
Just look at the progress in the DARPA grand challenge since the first year.

SB76 wrote:

I know some drivers are bad but i'm amazed that the comments so far for self-driving cars are positive.

Any such move would come with an awful lot of safety systems/testing before any governemnt would accept it on the road and rightly so.

The second part of that explains the rationale behind the first. We simply can't afford to test every single driver to the standards we'd expect of, say, pilots: hence, there are a lot of crap drivers.

We can, however, hold a few companies to a very high standard. Perhaps more importantly, when a driverless car does err, a team of intelligent people with the sole task of making cars better, with far less emotion clouding their judgement, can learn from it, and (if new hardware is not required) distribute that lesson to all driverless cars, with the cost of the latter being negligible.

It's the difference between treading water and rowing a boat - we're not going to need to expend resources keeping our road network just barely afloat (safety-wise) anymore. All the resources are being used to go forward.