News   Dec 20, 2024
UrbanToronto Year-End Poll: Vote on the Best Buildings of 2024, presented by Sapphire Balconies
 1.1K     5 
News   Dec 20, 2024
UrbanToronto's Social Media Presence Skyrocketed in 2024
 857     2 
News   Dec 20, 2024
Mattamy Homes Records A Year of Accomplishments
 1.7K     0 

Self-Driving Vehicles/Autonomous Vehicle Technology

diminutive said:
It's a though experiment which in practice doesn't seem very relevant. Autonomous vehicles, like humans, won't ever be making their decisions based on full information. They'll never be able to know everything about their surroundings. Maybe that women's stroller is just being used as a shopping cart and there is no baby in it, meanwhile maybe there are two kids in the parked car.

If an autonomous vehicle detects an obstruction that will likely cause an unavoidable accident, the best solution will always be to just apply the brakes instantly. Even if a collision is unavoidable reducing speed from ~40km to ~20km and informing trailing vehicles to brake immediately to avoid further collisions would be the morally preferable course of action.

Expecting cars to perform some moral-kamikaze is more likely just to cause automated versions of that accident were a woman caused a pileup trying to avoid hitting some ducks.
Click to expand...

Cars won't ever be able to know everything about road conditions, but they'll know more than humans could ever imagine.

For example, it's conceivable that all vehicles on the road will be sharing their sensor data with each other. One car will be able to see exactly what other cars are seeing. And the cars in the area would be able to coordinate their movement in such a way that one car avoids a collision (for example, clearing an escape route for a car in danger). So it's fully possible that we could see some pretty crazy collision avoidance maneuvers that human drivers wouldn't dare to attempt and that would be impossible for humans to attempt.

Now whether or not this will happen is a completely different question. It really depends on how much cooperation there is between manufacturers.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Cars won't ever be able to know everything about road conditions, but they'll know more than humans could ever imagine.

For example, it's conceivable that all vehicles on the road will be sharing their sensor data with each other. One car will be able to see exactly what other cars are seeing. And the cars in the area would be able to coordinate their movement in such a way that one car avoids a collision (for example, clearing an escape route for a car in danger). So it's fully possible that we could see some pretty crazy collision avoidance maneuvers that human drivers wouldn't dare to attempt and that would be impossible for humans to attempt.
Click to expand...

I would predict that much of this gets written into standards or regulations....more likely on an ISO or CSA level than provincial or state law. Decision rules like protocols for avoiding stalled vehicles need to be standard...it would be chaos if Toyotas veer left while Fords veer right in a given situation. Communication between vehicles would need to happen likewise.... you don't want a USB 1.0 vehicle not transponding to a USB 3.0 vehicle.

I can't imagine this concept getting very far without some sort of over-arching data system giving information on roadway integrity....something that would alert every vehicle to merge left around a sinkhole or debris on the road. Places that are prone to flooding or black ice could have sensors that broadcast alerts - not only will the car have more info than a driver, it will know it sooner and without the need for each car to detect it individually.

- Paul
 
Isn't this standard already being written and pioneered by Ford? I can't remember what it's called but I watched a program on it. V2V or something. It could be implemented today, too - just basically a "tell the car behind you I'm braking aggressively" and the whole train of cars stopped with no inchworming.
 
crs1026 said:
I can't imagine this concept getting very far without some sort of over-arching data system giving information on roadway integrity....something that would alert every vehicle to merge left around a sinkhole or debris on the road. Places that are prone to flooding or black ice could have sensors that broadcast alerts - not only will the car have more info than a driver, it will know it sooner and without the need for each car to detect it individually.

- Paul
Click to expand...

We've already seen the beginnings of this.

Tesla has a system where the information that one car learns is uploaded to a server and sent to all their cars. So when one car learns it, all cars learn it.

I'd imagine that for cooperative collision avoidance systems we wouldn't even need a centralized server collecting information. Instead it could be down ad-hoc, meaning that the cars will communicate directly to other cars in the area, without an intermediate. This reduces latency in decision making (milliseconds count in accident avoidance) and reduces the costs of maintaining the network.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
We've already seen the beginnings of this.

Tesla has a system where the information that one car learns is uploaded to a server and sent to all their cars. So when one car learns it, all cars learn it.

I'd imagine that for cooperative collision avoidance systems we wouldn't even need a centralized server collecting information. Instead it could be down ad-hoc, meaning that the cars will communicate directly to other cars in the area, without an intermediate. This reduces latency in decision making (milliseconds count in accident avoidance) and reduces the costs of maintaining the network.
Click to expand...

Yeah - telling every Tesla that there's an oil spill on Highway 401 at Keele seems kind of pointless. But there might be localised transponders, to tell cars what's over the next hill. It could be integrated with functionality allowing the MTO or OPP to declare a lane out of service (pretty high tech compared to parking their cruiser in the lane and activating their flashers, but probably desirable to get cars to merge efficiently) and/or how a central control center might use the information. For instance you could have a 'virtual guard rail' that lets you change the directionality of lanes....a center divider would no longer be needed or helpful, and you could for instance have 4 lanes of 6 running into the city in morning rush hour and 4 of 6 running out of the city in the afternoon.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
I'm sure they could have some sort of reusable external air bag that would deploy to flip the little guys safely back onto the shoulder of the road.

Although, in some parts of this continent, a roadkill counter next to the odometer would be a bigger selling feature....

- Paul
Click to expand...
How would roadkill be defined? Does crushing insects count? Even running over a water balloon may be considered roadkill.
 
Most modern cars (at least, my current two vehicles both do) have an emergency braking feature where applying pressure to the brake pedal rapidly (regardless of application force) immediately triggers maximum braking (using ABS to reduce wheel slip). I've triggered it inadvertently when startled on occasion (in a near-collision scenario) and it's absolutely remarkable how well it works. Those are the kinds of scenarios I see where the car already knows "something's up" and could easily send a ping back to the cars behind it to "Hey, DO THIS TOO." Imagine a string of cars driving fairly close together (hey, we all do it) at highway speeds, and suddenly someone in the lead slams on the brakes. In a typical scenario this results in a 3-4 vehicle fender bender. With a very simple system like above, all that would happen is that all of the vehicles in that string would just ramp down at almost exactly the same time.

Every time I watch Test Track at EPCOT running, I think about how efficient roads could be if cars just talked to each other. In the loading area, the whole train of cars move through the station instantly, together, as if they were mechanically coupled - no inchworming like you see when a light goes green.

For fun, have a read sometime about France's ARAMIS project. A lot of the bones for "electronic coupling" were developed back in the 70's.
 
Duck said:
Imagine a string of cars driving fairly close together (hey, we all do it) at highway speeds, and suddenly someone in the lead slams on the brakes. In a typical scenario this results in a 3-4 vehicle fender bender. With a very simple system like above, all that would happen is that all of the vehicles in that string would just ramp down at almost exactly the same time.
Click to expand...

This is probably one of the most important scenarios behind the whole idea. For every fatal accident, there are a hundred fender benders. I wonder if this kind of app could be standalone and deployable in 'conventional' autos. It would be instantly cost effective.

Of course, if we had this, we'd also have a function that wouldn't allow cars to get closer together than braking limits and computer reaction time allows. A self driving car isn't going to look at you and say 'Hey, we all do it' :)

- Paul
 
TheTigerMaster said:
We've already seen the beginnings of this.

Tesla has a system where the information that one car learns is uploaded to a server and sent to all their cars. So when one car learns it, all cars learn it.

I'd imagine that for cooperative collision avoidance systems we wouldn't even need a centralized server collecting information. Instead it could be down ad-hoc, meaning that the cars will communicate directly to other cars in the area, without an intermediate. This reduces latency in decision making (milliseconds count in accident avoidance) and reduces the costs of maintaining the network.
Click to expand...
We need both.

V2V is already being worked on, for reactive info like collective braking and evasive manoeuvres.

Central server for learning new situations like that dotted painted lines are sometimes orange coloured in construction sites. Or that Seattle currently has a rainbow coloured crosswalk this year in its Pride Village and that it's a pedestrian crosswalk and is not a construction marking. Or learning new streets got constructed in a suburb and they are already open now even if not in Google Maps yet. Or that there appears to be an unexpected long term street closure (unstable building) not yet reported to Google Maps, etc. Or that four big axle-risking potholes just formed on the commute route (and reports to server again if those later gets fixed).

They aren't mutually exclusive.
 
Last edited:
Autonomous cars fascinate me to no end. They are going to completely transform the way we get around in our cars and probably sooner than any of us realize. The fact that every collision that autonomous cars have been in has been the result of human error is telling - humans really are terrible drivers. Once autonomous cars become commercially available at prices comparable to conventional cars I think we're going to see government efforts to phase out human drivers altogether. I can see a point not too far in the future when driving is illegal and every car drives itself. At that point much of what we're used to about driving will become obsolete, from signs and traffic signals to police enforcement. This will mean big savings for the government. Car designs will be completely transformed too. Travelling in a car will become more like taking a train or flying.

While road space will undoubtedly be used much more efficiently, it could result in a lot more cars on the road. If there's no parking immediately outside your bank, you might set your car to drive around the block a few times while you're inside. Or you could have your car park for free far away from where you are, or even drive back home while you're at work. I've seen it predicted that car sharing will dominate since it will become effortless, but I think that car ownership will still be a thing.

People who still want to drive will have race tracks or maybe a few regular roads that still allow it for a fee. Track days could become big business to scratch the itch of people who want to feel some G's in a machine they're controlling. On the other hand, human driving will probably eventually be reduced to a niche activity that hardly anyone really knows how to do, like horse riding. The days of most of the population controlling a vehicle themselves and crashing into each other all the time will be looked at as a chaotic relic from the past, like how we think of crossing oceans in sailing ships. Our grandchildren are going to wonder how we ever survived to adulthood. And we'll have some pretty great "when I was your age" stories to tell them.
 
I've always said that in 100 years, we'll look back at how things are today and say "People actually manually operated those giant things? Like with a wheel? And you could just crash it into something and kill people if you weren't paying attention?"
 
Duck said:
I've always said that in 100 years, we'll look back at how things are today and say "People actually manually operated those giant things? Like with a wheel? And you could just crash it into something and kill people if you weren't paying attention?"
Click to expand...

"Grandpa, people actually used to drive cars? Were you guys insane? That sounds super dangerous"

- excerpt from a conversation 50 years from now
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top