Self Driving Cars Having Issues With Poor US Roads

[steviep24]

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/wheres-lane-self-driving-cars-confused-shabby-u-100918814--finance.html

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

[RobbieL2415]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

[steviep24]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

Exactly! Plus snow covered roads in winter.

[jeffandnicole]

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/wheres-lane-self-driving-cars-confused-shabby-u-100918814--finance.html

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

Adding time and cost? That would be true if self driving cars were going to be mass produced this year. It sounds like they are simply doing what computers do on a daily basis...figure out code for normal scenarios, then fine tune the programming for various issues.  There's a reason why self driving cars are years away, not weeks away.

[Jardine]

Seems like things like,

oh,


Idunno,


rain

fog,

dust


sleet


leaves


would be harder to all for in the software/hardware to cope with than what was mentioned in the link.

[US 41]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

Exactly! Plus snow covered roads in winter.

Can self driving cars avoid road kill.

[AlexandriaVA]

I wonder if self-driving cars have machine-learning algorithms that can alert them to the status and nature of people using cell phones or eating while driving?

[Max Rockatansky]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

By unimproved I'm assuming you mean just a crappy paved and neglected road?  Technically that means a dirt road without a grade, there isn't too much of those around in the north east or New England anymore.  Finding a serious dirt road in New England was a challenge...at least for me in six years of living there.  The only one that I can think of that was rural enough was Maine but they don't stack up against the bad lands in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana and Wyoming for unimproved dirt madness.

But on the crappy faded signage end nobody beats New England, lots of faded Interstate signs floating out there.

[Jardine]

We have dirt roads here. 

And while some of the county dirt roads are pretty scary, I have some access roads on my farm that would make you crap your pants.

I think this is near the Harrison/Monona line:




For some unknown reason, there are always idjits that want to see how soon after a good rain any given dirt road might be passable.  I'm pretty sure no one is going to want to send a self driving car down any of these pre-Columbian trails any time soon.

[vdeane]

There's at least a few backwater dirt roads here.  My boss visited one for a field meeting at rail crossing that's to be established.  It was raining and the town supervisor's vehicle (which looked pretty new to boot...) sunk axle deep.

[triplemultiplex]

Whoa, a hundred bucks for a LiDAR unit?  The future is awesome.  The ones I was using in the field cost like 12 grand apiece.

Why is anyone worried about shitty gravel roads that few people drive when it comes to self driving technology?  It's like going out of one's way to find a reason why it will "never" work and give up already.  Oh, what about gravel and snow and small animals and blah, blah blah...
One step at a time.  These criticisms are multiple generations of the technology ahead of the current state.  It's doing the exact same thing as the folks who over hype it by getting too far ahead of the tech.  None of them are unsolvable barriers.

This is going to happen over time with features slowly being added to vehicles that take over some element of vehicle operation in increasing complex environments.  Cars already brake by themselves in emergency situations better than human drivers.  They will soon prevent the vehicle from drifting from its travel lane.  Parking assist is a thing and will get increasingly common.  This is how self driving technology will evolve.  Every couple years, a new feature gets incorporated that makes the vehicle less collision prone.  No one is going to suddenly drop a fully automated car onto the market.  By the time that happens, every vehicle on the road will have some level of that type of technology implemented already.

[Pete from Boston]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

By unimproved I'm assuming you mean just a crappy paved and neglected road?  Technically that means a dirt road without a grade, there isn't too much of those around in the north east or New England anymore.  Finding a serious dirt road in New England was a challenge...at least for me in six years of living there.  The only one that I can think of that was rural enough was Maine but they don't stack up against the bad lands in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana and Wyoming for unimproved dirt madness.

But on the crappy faded signage end nobody beats New England, lots of faded Interstate signs floating out there.

Really?  I go to Vermont a few times a year and very few of the folks I know up there live on a paved road.

[Jardine]

One ding dong knocks down an overpass on the interstate and anyone could find themselves on a godforsaken detour to hell.

And we've had wild fires put enough smoke across the interstate here to cause pileups, the software and sensor suites need to be able to cope with the rare stuff too, or we are going to have mass casualty 100 vehicle pileups from corn shucks blowing across the road to a sheen of oil film on wet pavement.

Having the flash from a bolt of lightning in the field of view, or even the setting sun saturating a camera sensor, some mud washing onto the roadway, a drift of hail accumulating along the shoulder, might make some of these dirt trails easier to navigate than the interstate.

Will the software recognize something like the  Schoharie Creek Bridge washout as a hazard before it's too late ??

[Rothman]

I lived about a "block" away from a well-traveled whole network of dirt roads in Hampshire and Franklin counties in western MA.

In fact, getting to Boston from my home was faster by taking the dirt roads out to US 202 and MA 2 rather than taking the paved roads down to MA 9 and eventually to the Pike.

[vdeane]

Why is anyone worried about shitty gravel roads that few people drive when it comes to self driving technology?  It's like going out of one's way to find a reason why it will "never" work and give up already.  Oh, what about gravel and snow and small animals and blah, blah blah...
One step at a time.  These criticisms are multiple generations of the technology ahead of the current state.  It's doing the exact same thing as the folks who over hype it by getting too far ahead of the tech.  None of them are unsolvable barriers.

But they DO show that it will take much longer than the 5-10 years the media (and Google) claims it will be before human drivers are a thing of the past.

No one is going to suddenly drop a fully automated car onto the market.

Google is trying to, though.

[Max Rockatansky]

Wait until, if ever, they start testing them in the Northeast and New England.  Lots of unimproved, unpaved, and underappreciated roads here.

By unimproved I'm assuming you mean just a crappy paved and neglected road?  Technically that means a dirt road without a grade, there isn't too much of those around in the north east or New England anymore.  Finding a serious dirt road in New England was a challenge...at least for me in six years of living there.  The only one that I can think of that was rural enough was Maine but they don't stack up against the bad lands in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana and Wyoming for unimproved dirt madness.

But on the crappy faded signage end nobody beats New England, lots of faded Interstate signs floating out there.

Really?  I go to Vermont a few times a year and very few of the folks I know up there live on a paved road.

Like I said, I lived in New England for an extended period of time.  Yes there are dirt and gravel roads but they aren't to the same crappy quality that you might see heading to some old mine or through some vast swath of desert.  Have a look at some of the through roads out in the Mojave Preserve much less most of San Bernardino County and you'll see what I mean.  There are still State highways that are dirt out west like AZ 88, it just isn't the same thing.  My neighbor had a private dirt road heading to their house in Connecticut for example, so yes I'm fully aware of what you are describing. 

We have dirt roads here. 

And while some of the county dirt roads are pretty scary, I have some access roads on my farm that would make you crap your pants.

I think this is near the Harrison/Monona line:




For some unknown reason, there are always idjits that want to see how soon after a good rain any given dirt road might be passable.  I'm pretty sure no one is going to want to send a self driving car down any of these pre-Columbian trails any time soon.

Well that's a little more along the lines of what is common out here if not even worse. 

Why is anyone worried about shitty gravel roads that few people drive when it comes to self driving technology?  It's like going out of one's way to find a reason why it will "never" work and give up already.  Oh, what about gravel and snow and small animals and blah, blah blah...
One step at a time.  These criticisms are multiple generations of the technology ahead of the current state.  It's doing the exact same thing as the folks who over hype it by getting too far ahead of the tech.  None of them are unsolvable barriers.

But they DO show that it will take much longer than the 5-10 years the media (and Google) claims it will be before human drivers are a thing of the past.

No one is going to suddenly drop a fully automated car onto the market.

Google is trying to, though.

And that's just to make the technology practical to the slightest extent in an urban area which is mainly what these self driving cars are mainly purposed for.  It's a much different ball game getting automated technology working on a rural highway much less anything in the mountains, gravel or dirt.  There is a pretty good chance that the whole concept goes the way of the flying car still, Google has a very long way to go.

[Sykotyk]

The 'self-driving car' in an urban area would basically replace cabs, ubers, and lyfts, rather than people who already own their own car. People may give up their own car in an urban area in exchange for an easily accessible fleet of cheaper, more reliable, safer, self-driving cabs that they can take without the fuss of maintaining their own vehicle. But, the biggest hit won't be to car owners who drive.

In more rural areas, self-driving cars would make things more difficult in the short term.

Maintenance costs of a self-aware car would be much higher than your own car. In Ohio, we still don't have mandatory inspections, even. Cost of car ownership is cheap when you can 'let things go' much longer than a car who knows their car isn't running optimally and requires service. Hell, it might drive itself to the shop and you're left with the bill as part of your purchase agreement. And god forbid you don't do everything on the manufacturer's service schedule, or if there's an accident and your vehicle is deemed at fault, you will be the one held liable, not the manufacturer. Even if in your own personal car you would never get that level of scrutiny from an accident. At fault or not.

The other big issue is: traffic laws. With self-aware self-driving cars, they will route themselves around traffic jams, accidents, etc. But, what if a town doesn't want a bunch of cars bombarding residential areas during rush hour because the self-aware car handles the start-stop better than an average driver who would rather just sit in traffic on the main line? If the town instituted a regulation that through traffic must stay on the main roads to accommodate the residential areas from an uptick in traffic, you have a whole new system of control.

And throw in everyone with an older car, or a car they WANT to drive themselves, dealing with a calculating self-aware car. Just as google had the run-in with the bus, the car assumed something that wasn't true, but did not yield even when it deemed itself to be in legal compliance and the bus was wrong. You're going to see that multiply with car drivers still driving older cars or driving these self-aware cars in manual mode.

[Pete from Boston]

I just hope the artificial drivers are friendly.

[jeffandnicole]

The media is generally the worst - they exaggerate the hell out of anything they can get their hands on.

I don't think anyone that thinks clearly would think we would all be in driverless cars in 10 years.  We have already seen the start of that technology though, which is mainly limited to parallel parking.  Technologies take time but it can rapidly accelerate once everything falls into place. 

The biggest miss I always say is the internet.  In the 80's and early 90's, the talk was 500 cable stations, where we could be doing our shopping and ordering right from the TV.   Then, then Internet came along.  Fast.  By the mid-90's, you could look up a fair deal of info on the internet.  Some of the original shopping networks, such as eBay, were starting up.  You could start to book your own travel.  By the mid-2000's, just a decade after the public could start getting plugged in to the internet, it was possible to do quite a bit on the web.  And Cable TV providers and networks, thinking that they were going to be the main method for providing these services, were caught off-guard, and had to rebound.  They did so by being the internet providers for our home networks.

Cell Phones are another item that largely wasn't seen.  25 years ago cell phone technology was so basic, if you had a car phone, you basically had to be in your home network area in order to make or receive a call.  And that expanded to making phone calls around the country...and world. What was kinda missed was text messaging...and then the whole smart phone technology.   In the 80's if you had a home computer, it was pricey, and it took up a lot of room.  Today's phones have more memory then those things did .

So don't think that 10 or 15 years from now what they're attempting to do with self-driving cars won't happen.

Maintenance costs of a self-aware car would be much higher than your own car. In Ohio, we still don't have mandatory inspections, even. Cost of car ownership is cheap when you can 'let things go' much longer than a car who knows their car isn't running optimally and requires service.

Oh, it may seem like it's cheaper to let things go.  In the long run, it's gonna cost you.  A lot.

Even if in your own personal car you would never get that level of scrutiny from an accident. At fault or not.

I think there's a fair amount of scrutiny behind the scenes that you're just not aware of.  And in the long future when most cars are self-driving, car accidents should be a thing of the past because cars will be talking and aware of each other and see other things on a much more automatic basis than what you see today.  Literally, think Jetsons: Cars are all criss-crossing one another.  As car drivers, we would never dare do that.  Automatic cars talking to each other can do that...safely!

The other big issue is: traffic laws. With self-aware self-driving cars, they will route themselves around traffic jams, accidents, etc. But, what if a town doesn't want a bunch of cars bombarding residential areas during rush hour because the self-aware car handles the start-stop better than an average driver who would rather just sit in traffic on the main line? If the town instituted a regulation that through traffic must stay on the main roads to accommodate the residential areas from an uptick in traffic, you have a whole new system of control.

Currently, the MUTCD doesn't allow for that.  So you're talking a change on a federal level.  And it may be possible.  But again, far in the future, accidents should be minimal.  Congestion will probably reduce as well.  But today there's already people cutting thru neighborhoods, and in the future, in theory if it's happening, automated cars will be going the speed limit, not flying thru as some drivers do today.

If a town does want to prevent it, they can put in cul-de-sacs and other devices that limit the ability to drive thru.  The problem is the residents in the development are usually the ones that suffer when they are limited to one way in and out!

And throw in everyone with an older car, or a car they WANT to drive themselves, dealing with a calculating self-aware car. Just as google had the run-in with the bus, the car assumed something that wasn't true, but did not yield even when it deemed itself to be in legal compliance and the bus was wrong. You're going to see that multiply with car drivers still driving older cars or driving these self-aware cars in manual mode.

You do understand that happens thousands of time a day with manual vs. manual driving vehicles?  Drivers are always assuming the other driver will do something.  Sometimes, it doesn't work out that way!

[tradephoric]

Consider the airline industry.  Commercial flights are capable of autonomous flight but does that mean the pilots are just sleeping or reading a book when the plane is on autopilot?  I sure hope not!  You need a competent pilot to manually override the controls when an autonomous system fails.  And the margin of error of a plane flying at 30,000 feet is a lot greater than a vehicle driving 12 feet away from oncoming traffic.  Pilots have 30,000 feet to react to a problem on a plane.  Drivers may only have seconds to react before their autonomous vehicle drives into oncoming traffic.  The idea that a person can be checking their emails or reading a book as their autonomous vehicle drives down the road at 55 mph is a total pipe dream.

[kalvado]

Consider the airline industry.  Commercial flights are capable of autonomous flight but does that mean the pilots are just sleeping or reading a book when the plane is on autopilot?  I sure hope not!  You need a competent pilot to manually override the controls when an autonomous system fails.  And the margin of error of a plane flying at 30,000 feet is a lot greater than a vehicle driving 12 feet away from oncoming traffic.  Pilots have 30,000 feet to react to a problem on a plane.  Drivers may only have seconds to react before their autonomous vehicle drives into oncoming traffic.  The idea that a person can be checking their emails or reading a book as their autonomous vehicle drives down the road at 55 mph is a total pipe dream.

I could repeat that, word by word, as an argument for disallowing humans to interfere with computer control.
drivers may only have seconds to react before their autonomous vehicle drives into oncoming traffic.  The idea that a person - old, tired or sleepy -  can be grasping the steering wheel as their manually controlled vehicle drives down the road at 55 mph is a total pipe dream.

[Katavia]

Why can't they just not have to deal with the problem by making unpaved roads "human controlled only"?

[tradephoric]

I could repeat that, word by word, as an argument for disallowing humans to interfere with computer control.
drivers may only have seconds to react before their autonomous vehicle drives into oncoming traffic.  The idea that a person - old, tired or sleepy -  can be grasping the steering wheel as their manually controlled vehicle drives down the road at 55 mph is a total pipe dream.

There are pitot tubes on an airplane that measures airspeed.  Periodically, these pitot tubes can become clogged and give inaccurate airspeeds causing the autopilot to disengage.  If you don't have a competent pilot to take manual control of the plane, something as simple as a clogged pitot tube can lead to a catastrophic crash.  I don't know about you, but i don't want a plane to crash every time a pitot tube gets clogged.   The automated systems have made the airline industry safer but you still need competent pilots in the cockpit to react when something goes wrong.   The same type of thinking would apply to autonomous vehicles on the road.  Sure, autonomous vehicles could make roadways safer but it would be foolish not to have someone behind the wheel to react when an autonomous system fails.  And if that person is just checking his emails or reading a book, they probably won't be able to react in time when something does go wrong.

[kalvado]

I could repeat that, word by word, as an argument for disallowing humans to interfere with computer control.
drivers may only have seconds to react before their autonomous vehicle drives into oncoming traffic.  The idea that a person - old, tired or sleepy -  can be grasping the steering wheel as their manually controlled vehicle drives down the road at 55 mph is a total pipe dream.

There are pitot tubes on an airplane that measures airspeed.  Periodically, these pitot tubes can become clogged and give inaccurate airspeeds causing the autopilot to disengage.  If you don't have a competent pilot to take manual control of the plane, something as simple as a clogged pitot tube can lead to a catastrophic crash.  I don't know about you, but i don't want a plane to crash every time a pitot tube gets clogged.   The automated systems have made the airline industry safer but you still need competent pilots in the cockpit to react when something goes wrong.   The same type of thinking would apply to autonomous vehicles on the road.  Sure, autonomous vehicles could make roadways safer but it would be foolish not to have someone behind the wheel to react when an autonomous system fails.  And if that person is just checking his emails or reading a book, they probably won't be able to react in time when something does go wrong.

Well, if you look carefully at how much effort is put towards keeping pitots clear, how much redundancy is there, and how good are those pilots at following SOP for "unreliable speed indication", as well as remember a major crash due to pitot icing.. I am not sure if old saying about replacing FO with the dog is actually a joke.

[tradephoric]

What point are you trying to make here kalvado.  What do you envision when it comes to autonomous vehicles?  Do you imagine people taking naps in their autonomous vehicle as they get chauffeured to their destination?  To me that is fantasy land.