OT: UM opens 30-acre "city" for testing driverless cars
"Automakers and researchers say a new simulated city at the University of Michigan could help speed the development of driverless and connected cars."
Source: U.S. News & World Report, July 20, 2015
GM, Ford & Toyota have paid over $1 million each to have first crack at the track. They will be doing tests that include communicating with different brand vehicles, reading mud covered road signs, obstacle avoidance, reading faded lane markers and other things.
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Really glad to read the part about leaving snow on the test track. That's one of my biggest questions about autonomous cars...can they actually handle Michigan roads year-round?
Computers do very well in "IF X THEN Y" type situations, but that logic breaks down pretty quickly when a few snow flurries dancing around make things more open-ended.
Where are the lanes? How does the car KNOW to leave extra distance between other cars? What is this salt-like substance that is on the road surface? How does the car deal with the dramatically reduced traction? Et cetera.
I know that people say "well, in instances like that, the driver will just HAVE to take over." Problem is, that when drivers are not driving all the time, they do have less opportunities to learn defensive driving skills (a good skill to learn even when it's sunny and 75 degrees out) --- the driver can take over but it is a less-experienced driver taking over.
different types of snowy or icy conditions? Living in the lake effect snow belt areas of western Michigan most of my life, no two snowy days are alike when it comes to driving conditions. Even in one single drive (my daily commute is just over 20 miles each way), I often run into constantly changing conditions between home and work.
Even the Eskimos know how different one snow is from another, I remember reading years ago that they have numerous names for the different types of snow they encounter.
And what do snow and ice lead to every winter in Michigan? POTHOLES!
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Autonomous cars are going to be a game changer of major proportions as will be autonoous trucks that will follow sooner than later. Eventually, we will say goodbye to Uber as well as having significantly less ownership of vehicles. Ford has already recognized this and is working on a new business model.
Your own personal taxi and it doesn't matter how many drinks you have had as long as you can input your home address and some payment means. Safety should be improved vastly as more and more cars are self-driven.
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Sometimes I wonder if we're going to innovate everyone out of jobs. That sounds somewhat political but I'm serious. At some points robots / automation will be able to do a ton of jobs cheaper and more efficient than people can. What happens then?
There's a very interesting video about this:
Some guy got out in front of this by about 60 years.
but Judge Smails had it right, "The world needs ditch diggers too"
I know no politics, but I thought this was a point that Charles Krauthammer brought out on a Fox News show about 6-8 months that really stuck with me, basically a lot of our political elite talk about "new economies" and getting more "green jobs" like computer programmers at google and what not.. but not everybody is capable of the high tech jobs or working finance at Goldman Sachs. That's not denegrating their work or value- you can have respect and pride in a manual labor job. That's what made the auto industry great IMO, sure it was tough manual labor on the line and it didn't take a lot of "skill" to turn a wrench, but you were building something and took pride in the end product. Culturally, we have over time de-valued the worth and "pride of ownership" in labor intensive fields, but there's value and moral good-i-tude in keeping productive and working hard. That translates into a society that then can overcome the really big challenges like financial hardship and wars and such. Unfortunately, you build in a mentality that everything's hard and we need automation to do some aspect of everything in our life, and then what? How does the human respond? I'm not saying we need to go back to a 1940's level of industrial technology, but the constant drive to automate everything is I think robbing humanity of some key maturation and resiliency aspects,and almost creating a permanent underclass of drones.
But of course, automated cars theoretically can save lives, so "won't someone think about the CHILDREN???"
Automation inherently makes a vast array of jobs more efficient. As time goes on, and AI and computing power both increase, there will be more and more machine substitutes for human labor. If you follow anything on the growth of robotics, you should be aware how robotics is a game changer...for the better in terms of cost of goods sold, but not so good for the unemployment rate.
The problem is that in a global economy, either you work efficiently or you can't be competitive. If third world labor rates are 1/10 of what they are in the US, that's your benchmark. If robotics creates the same condition, so be it. Lots of societal questions but very few answers because increased automation also tends to cause a greater disparity in terms of wealth.
Regardless, from some of the drivers I see on the roads, autonomous cars will only be an improvement.
Give the old timers there freedom back and maybe get drunks home safe. I can only imagine how many people will be passed out at drive trough windows at 2am in there smart cars.
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The fascination with automated cars just shows how truly lazy people can be.
Why the hell should we pay attention to the road when we can be eating, sleeping, watching TV & doing whatever we can for that 25 minute drive?
Just wait until that fateful first accident where someone gets in a car not realizing that it isn't one of the driverless vehicles. "Wat u meen u gots 2 drive it?"
Reality is probably somewhere in the middle of these two opinions... There are obvious benefits to have driverless cars, but it would seem the infrastructure is a ways off, as is the issue of making them affordable to everyone. To me, the model only works if its accepted universally.
This is kind of sad though, I really like driving... road trips to Madison, Happy Valley and plenty of other destinationas around the country are some of my fondest memories, as is the autonomy to just cruise unknown cities discovering new places. With autonomous cars, its put in the destination and then you'll be there, but what if you don't have a destination?
Maybe it can be something like in I, Robot. In which, most people will be driving autonomously, but you still have the option for manual control. So if you want to go off without a destination you still can. I'm with you about driving. It's one of my favorite past times and even my general commute of 10 minutes back and forth is time I treasure.
I always imagined we'd reach a point where highways were 100% automated. Pull in, turn over control to the highway, and everyone can travel faster, safer. I don't want to give up my ability to drive but I can see the whole system changing
I'm growing more convinced I'm going to end up like Dennis Leary's character, eating rat cheeseburgers and purposefully maintaining a '79 El Camino in an underground cabal.
I got that already by living in NYC. No car = no car problems or expenses!
Question: If your car can drive itself, how will that eliminate parking & insurance?
I recently read an article that in the 30,000 (??? Was a large number anyway) hours of driving self driving Google cars have had 12 accidents...all caused by drivers in other cars (sorry don't have the link).
Also - if it's a driverless car, it will let you out and then go park itself (assuming it's a self owned car...new ownership models are likely, as the poster above suggests), thus saving you the time and effort.
"Just wait until that fateful first accident where someone gets in a car not realizing that it isn't one of the driverless vehicles. 'Wat u meen u gots 2 drive it?'"
I'm guessing this will never, ever happen.
This is a real fear amongst the people who are developing driverless cars. Some advocate for a much more incremental approach whereby more and more systems will slowly be automated (like cruise controm and parallel parking assistance). From this perspective, full automation would be no more disruptive than the "feature" where a car beeps at you if you are drifting out of your lane. In other words, designers hope that we will ease into driverless cars similar to how we adopted anti-lock breaks (I think only my first 2 cars didn't have them).
Yeah, what's an hour out of your day every day of your life?
Protip... not sure if they are offering compensated studies for this, but the UMTRI did one the last few years and you can make like 400 bucks just by driving your car around downtown and the north side of town.
"We just drove 'em ourselves!"
"Wow, and no one died that way?"
"Oh no, millions of people died"
I hope I get the joy of explaining that to my grandchildren. Just like how I get to explain to kids what life was like before cell phones and the internet. It's hilarious
I'm 24 and I don't know what that means. I've heard it before, just never had to do it.
I'm 27 and used to use it middle school
"Please state your name after the tone"
"MOMILEFTMYMATHHOMEWORKONTHECOUNTERCANYOUBRINGITTOSCHOOL"
Anticipating a dip before year's end. Buy in then.
Not impressed. Where is my teleportation?
Ah, so this is the Michigan student's response to the Ohio State student's "Those pizzas won't deliver themselves."