The way M.I.T.'s Leonard sees it, these elements of unreliability are what hinder a place for self-driving cars in our future. "Imagine a situation where a box falls on the road in front of you because it wasn't strapped down properly," he says. "The system needs to make a split-second decision to either go straight through it or to swerve left or right—which might have worse consequences than just going forward. The crux of the problem lies in those extreme situations at the tails of the curve that get harder and harder to deal with."
"Despite all the best efforts of the robot designers, humans still do stupid things," Leonard says. "Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?"
Huge potential rewards
Even with possibly unsolvable issues, the team at Google sees the vast promise in the technology to save lives, reduce energy consumption and increase productivity as enough reason to continue pursuing it. Already, they have seen the system exhibit unexpected "intelligence" by combining bits of behavior that were fed into it and churning out surprisingly beneficial results.
Urmson recalled a moment on a recent test drive as the car was approaching a crosswalk and it came to a stop for no apparent reason. He began to tell his co-driver that it was likely a bug in the software, but at just that moment an elderly woman stepped into the road from where she was hidden behind a row of parked cars. "To me those are the most exciting moments because they show the promise of this system to be able to see more than a human can," he says.
Whereas evidence such as this certainly hints at the huge promise of robot-driven vehicles, Leonard sees a number of major technical challenges before truly autonomous cars become reality. "There are ways for self-driving car technology to have an impact and save lives without delivering completely autonomous vehicles," he says, adding that bits and pieces of the technology will likely deliver new and ingenious safety and environmental benefits. "But the question of how to deliver fully autonomous vehicles remains unanswered to me."
As the company with the most resources invested in the project and a reputation for successful technological innovation, Google's effort has certainly convinced many people that they will soon be able to nap on their morning commute while a robot car efficiently whisks them to work—and the Google team makes no attempt to dissuade this kind of wishful thinking, believing the technology will reach consumers' hands (or hands-free) relatively soon.
"With any kind of technology, making predictions for the future or how quickly things will be adopted is very difficult," Urmson says. "A decade out is a safe estimate, but I think it's really hard to say." @font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Verdana"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.msoIns { text-decoration: underline; color: green; }span.msoDel { text-decoration: line-through; color: red; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
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16 Comments
Add Comment"Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?" that is a very interesting comment. Ethically, it is a reasonable trade-off but people will see it differently. People will see those deaths as additional as though the number of people killed has increased. It is similar with medicines. A medicine may help a large number of people but if a small number of people have bad reactions to the drug, the general public sees those problems as additional issues and not part of the checks and balances. It is as though the drug has only caused the bad reactions and not helped anyone. The anti-vaccine and naturopath crowds are famous for this kind of reasoning and I suspect driverless planes, trains and automobiles will experience the same thing. The general public has no idea of the number of people killed by automobile accidents. But the first time someone is killed in an autonomous car everyone will know and autonomous cars will be credited with one kill not one million lives saved. The real challenge as always is not in making smart cars, but making smart people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not just the perception relative safety, but the perception of loss of control. Many people will not want to surrender control of the vehicle to an unseen and uncommunicative force.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLooking at the tendency of an even slightly overloaded roadway to develop jams and voids in traffic, it is understandable that drivers will be frustrated that a robotic vehicle would occasionally travel under the speed limit with space in front of it, following an algorithm that prevents a jam miles down the road.
Observing that most of the drivers in certain regions speed, it is understandable if drivers would be frustrated with a car that never exceeds the speed limit.
If you are reading the newspaper or something, do you really care if your self-driven car never exceeds the speed limit? It's possible to come up with a fairly accurate time of arrival - would most people really care what the intermediate speeds are?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Many people will not want to surrender control of the vehicle to an unseen and uncommunicative force." people do it all the time in public transit and airplanes. I'm not sure about the speeding though. Not too many people on buses or trains complain that they are driving the speed limit. When taken together with you comment about control I think it is more likely that people will feel more secure if the vehicle demonstrates that it follows traffic laws to the letter. Remember, people think that when they are driving crazy, they are driving correctly for the conditions, when the other guy does it, it is because he is a maniac. I think most people would panic if the vehicle started driving the way they drive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany people like driving and won't want to hand over control of their cars to a computer. That's unless there's traffic conjestion, they have to drive the same old boring road with a 50km/h limit and speed cams, they are tired after work, they want to go out for a few drinks with their friends, or are already elderly and not as comfortable driving any more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, you care that your car is doing the 55 mph speed limit, all the human-driven cars are doing a much more reasonable 75 mph, and you are eventually going to get hit in the rear and killed because you are a mobile road block.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo.
The 5 that are saved are going to be the worst drivers among us, while the computers in the cars are going to kill people at random, including the very best of drivers that have no accidents at all, ever. If you are such a driver, why would you ever get into a car that kills occupants from time to time?
I would want much much more than a 50% reduction in traffic injuries and deaths from my computer controlled car. There's no reason that a driver than never falls asleep, never gets bored, never gets distracted, never feels the need to race another vehicle, never feels slighted when another car cuts it off, should not be able to drop the fatality and injury rate by a factor of 10 or 20. All accidents should be the fault of the other vehicle, and the robot driver should be excellent at avoiding even those accidents.
I think that by the time robotic driving is real and commonplace, the reduction in death rate will be more like 999:1, than 2:1
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rally2xs : less coffee
@everyone else : I hope so.
A necessary step to autonomous cars is the integration of these technologies into standard automobiles as collision avoidance systems. If these technologies could successfully avoid accidents in real world situations by either alerting the driver to potential dangers or by taking limited action (such as braking) if the driver fails to respond to the system’s warning, the value of these technologies would be proven.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet these technologies save a driver from a potentially devastating accident and the psychological barriers to autonomous control of vehicles will disappear.
I'm concerned with how it will deal with those tire eating potholes that appear without warning, construction, and the line painting orange cones. Not to mention accidents and detours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll assume it can deal with the Driver's Ed scenario where a ball comes bouncing into the street, followed by the kid chasing it.
An automated driver might have a better shot at avoiding potholes than human drivers since they could have radar as a sensor, as well as possibly being networked with other cars ahead that have already identified the pothole. In fact, the car might have already downloaded the location of all potholes on the intended route as the car is leaving the driveway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think much could be done that is not possible now via computer communications. The challenges will likely be the dynamic things - a tumbleweed is blown into the path of the car - avoiding it could cause a skid and crash, while hitting it might mess up some paint, depending... what to do? That's a tougher decision for a computer, I think.
We surrender the accelerator to speed control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome drivers now let the car park itself; or to tell them if something is too close and institutes autobraking.
This is just one step further.
At my age I can see great value in a car that can call 911 and drive straight to the hospital emergency room. Or one that can detect the Alcohol on your breath and refuse to go into a bar's parking lot if you are about to reach the legal limit. I would feel a lot safer if I knew, when the bars let out, the patron's car would be the designated driver. Even so, I know several people who would try to drive over a cliff, just to prove it could be done. You also have to realize that in an age when hackers have broken into the Pentagon's computers, the system in the self driving car would have to be totally fool proof.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTechnology help everyone on the world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href="http://tapchipcworld.blogspot.com/2011/08/steve-jobs-resigns-as-ceo-of-apple.html">Google Plus SEO</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe you have just answered their pre-mapping problem. It is very rare that you are the first person to drive along a particular stretch of road.
As data comes in, it could be transmitted to subsequent vehicles traveling along the same path, thus creating the map on a continuous basis. Of course, transient data, such as the kid chasing the ball, could be accounted for as a heads up to subsequent vehicles to use extra caution in that area. A crash could also transmit data to vehicles farther away to reroute around it.
In the event of uncertainty, the autopilot would alert the person in the driver's seat and disengage if needed, bringing the vehicle to a safe stop along the side of the road. For example, if map data were unavailable or outdated(data expires after a set number of hours), you could not engage the autopilot, but it would continue to map out the road you are on for subsequent drivers or possibly for your return trip.
Static road signs could be made machine-readable through RFID and signals could be enhanced with transmitters in the long term to help alleviate the need for pre-mapping.
The marvelous use of vehicle activated radar:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe vehicle activated radar is device used to calculate the speed of the vehicles which is running beyond the speed of the law permitted. The people who used break rules often on road. This very best device is developed for to indentify the culprits and show them to the law and get punished.