Autonomous Systems
- Thread starter Blakkheim
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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Tuco, is there any future in getting the autonomous software to 99%, and then letting a human pilot remotely control the vehicle through a "situation" ? Like the vehicle encounters construction (this might only work for 18 wheelers since there would be an appropriate amount of money at stake) then a human logs in and remotes it though...
Or are people just really not ready for that yet?
Or are people just really not ready for that yet?
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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No that's a big part of the field of robotics and drive-by-wire vehicles.
Biggest problem is that long distance teleoperation is hard.
Here's a good video published by some of the top in the field on a project I'm not super familiar with, but at a glance covers some of the basics. If you have any specific questions I can ask them, but am about to leave on a trip so enjoy my phone posting for a few days!
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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I think a lot of these scenarios that a computer couldn't figure out like "don't park in the muddy spot" could probably be overcome with some mechanism to let a human tell the vehicle what to do. Like if you want it to park or even back up to a certain spot you could just set a card on the ground with a symbol on it that the car/truck could recognize and give it a "back up here" command. Here on the ranch I am driving off-road all the time and it's hard to imagine a scenario where autonomous driving would really make sense (how do you tell a computer to chase that bull back to the pasture he's supposed to be in?) but I think it will probably wind up being a combination of driver controlled vehicles that don't go on the public roads (ATVs) and some sort of special situation mode where humans can control the vehicle even if it's not necessarily by sitting in the driver's seat and turning the steering wheel and pushing the brake and accelerator yourself.
khorum
Murder Apologist
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Since I'm not a fucking savage I don't actually have any family in Philadelphia so someone else should try to get into one of Uber's self-driving cabs and tape their trip just so we can see what Tuco's pooh-poohing is all about. The $600-million project formed with the former google car/Stanford team under Sebastian Thru and most of the Carnegie Mellon DARPA team is apparently already running six of the cars on the streets in downtown philly now and gradually adding more until 100 by the end of the year.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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kaid
Blackwing Lair Raider
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One option would be similar to what we use on rovers on mars. Autonomous vehicle that is getting its inputs on where it should be going and what it should be doing via teleoperation and uses its on board sensors/AI to determine how best to carry out those commands.. Pure teleoperation would as noted in that video be both hard and dangerous due to latency. The biggest danger with pure teleoperation is the classic kids running out into the street or deer jumping out unexpectedly. With teleoperation you basically would never be able to respond rapidly enough to prevent the impact.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Aye that is the essemce of semi-autonomous teleoperation. Big problem is figuring out user intent accurately and quickly.
kaid
Blackwing Lair Raider
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I think for it to be used you would need cars pretty capable of full autonomy and then have the teleoperator stations for things like trucking logistics. Telling the truck what roads to use and if you need to change the route due to traffic/weather/change of destination you could give it updates and it could then calculate what it needs to do. In cars it would not be needed simply because in theory the person in the car could give the updates although I guess in theory if you are at work you could send your car home for the family to use or to pick up a friend from your computer.
Tripamang
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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After playing around with F1 fan cars in GT5 I can't fucking wait for this. I'm not super big into motor sports but watching some extremely high speed racing with crazy aerodynamic cars would be really exciting. Plus you never have to feel guilty about taking pleasure into an extremely destructive crash.
Borzak
Silver Baron of the Realm
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Semi related but I saw uber lost a billion dollars in the first 2 quarters of this year. I don't understand the attraction of those who say you'll be able to request a car that self drives and comes and picks you up and takes you someplace. I mean that sounds nice, until at some point you want to go further than across town. What do you do then? Rent a car or what?
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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I recently saw a demo of something Verizon is trying to get part of, which is streamlining the rental process. Basically they want to be the infrastructure to support an improved car rental system.
Article: Verizon Auto Share Streamlines Asset Sharing with Self-Serve Car Rentals
The end result would be someone like Budget would have thousands of cars scattered across the city, and as a user you'd just get notified to where the closest one is, walk up, wave your mobile device at it and it'd unlock and be ready to drive. There's a lot of practical problems with this, ex:
Who is liable when you rent a car and dump it off in a bad neighborhood and it all of a sudden gets stolen?
How do they guarantee a vehicles are where they need to be?
How do they get privileges to store vehicles across the city? Even places like Walmart or the mall aren't going to want random vehicles parked indefinitely on their property while someone else profits from it.
The upside of this is pretty good though. Renting a car right now is a pain in the ass unless you do it often enough to get in their streamlined system and are stepping off a plane. Right now if I had to rent a car I'd have to first call an Uber to drive me to the rental center some half hour away. The process of renting always takes all damn day because they have to explode their profit margins trying to grind me down until I accept their bloated insurance rates.
If there were 3 cars parked within a kilometer of me that I could easily go and drive wherever I wanted at less cost than today's rental car, it'd be nice.
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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I didn't read the article, but several cities have something like that already. I know San Diego does for sure, called car2go. You basically just find one of their cars, activate it with your app, and leave it wherever (there are restrictions about how it has to be accessible).
They're all little fucking smart cars though.
They're all little fucking smart cars though.
Alex
Still a Music Elitist
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Yes, we have a few services around here like that. I use Zipcar and it's fine for day trips but it's not cost effective beyond more than 24 hours because they charge by the hour. They do charge by the 24 hour period but the rate is more expensive than going to Hertz or something. They also usually have mileage limitations on them. I think Zipcar is less than 300 miles so I couldn't even use it to go to Tahoe or LA.