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autonomous vehicles

Former CMU student builds autonomous robot tricycle for food delivery. It travels at about 10 mph in the bike lane. https://www.wired.com/story/food-delivery-robot-wants-share-bike-lane/
paulheckbert
2019-07-20 09:58:33
That article mentions a Pittsburgh cyclist who cycled the wrong way through traffic and between cars.
jonawebb
2019-07-21 21:26:13
Elon Musk is always promising full self driving cars 18 months in the future. He's been doing this for years. Eventually he'll be right.
edronline
2019-07-22 08:24:16
*autonomous cars are just the test cases for the real goal here - autonomous trucks. The thinking is that if they can perfect the technology on more heavily congested and challenging roads and streets in urban areas, then adapting that tech to over-the-road trucks for long-haul will be a snap. IMHO, I doubt autonomous cars will ever be widely used, if at all. But trucks on interstates, yeah, I can totally see that, and probably sooner than later.
atleastmykidsloveme
2019-07-22 11:32:06
Autonomous trucks are a simpler problem since they can be limited to highways outside of urban areas, where the problems get really hard. And there are simpler use cases like letting the driver sleep for a while on the long drives between dropoffs and pickups. Autonomous cars are much harder, even beyond all the complicated cases that the article hints at. There's a social element, and the problem that autonomous cars simply can't move as quickly through an urban environment as a human driver who pushes the boundaries. As I understand it, car companies (other than Tesla) have given up on the idea of fully autonomous driving for now, and are looking at augmenting humans -- alerting when the driver seems to be doing something dangerous, like drifting out of lane etc.
jonawebb
2019-07-22 11:39:08
A very good article on why pedestrian death rates are twice as high in the US as in other advanced countries (car culture, designing roads for fast driving, tall SUVs that crush, focus on individual responsibility), on pedestrian detection systems in new cars (they're not very good) and the motivation for autonomous vehicles development (it's profit from eliminating drivers, not safety). Quotes: “I don’t think there’s any chance that autonomous vehicles will deliver us a safe future, and I don’t necessarily think the companies think so either. I think they think we’ll buy a lot of stuff. The safe future will recede before our eyes like a desert mirage.” "All this [autonomous vehicle] activity – and the rollout of shiny pedestrian avoidance systems – feeds more credulous media coverage, stoking our cultural sense, unsupported by any evidence, that of course our hardworking nerds are on the brink of unveiling safe self-driving cars. Why not? A car that is basically a smartphone will, of course, have no temptation to look at its smartphone." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars
paulheckbert
2019-10-11 15:30:09