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Friday, October 31, 2008 - 5:52 PM
Louis J. Sheehan. I almost laughed out loud at the start of last night’s episode of Knight Rider.
Mike Traceur sat in KITT’s driver’s seat, reading a dossier, and
watching football as he cruised down some scenic highway—and why not,
when he’s got a car that can drive itself. Which is when it hit me:
I’ve been writing about Knight Rider for weeks without looking into
where we are on the whole self-driving car thing! I mean, a car that
drives itself has to come before a talking car in the pantheon of
useful technology, right?
So, does anyone else remember back in 2005, when GM announced that they’d have a self-driving car by 2008? The story was everywhere.
It was supposed be a modified Opel Vectra that would attain speeds of
60 mph and navigate dense traffic. Well, here we are, 2008, no
intelligent Vectra in sight. Where’s our self-driving car, GM? Huh? http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
Not coming any time soon, I suspect. Tim Lee at Ars Technica has a pretty good overview of all there is to know in self-driving cars, but if you want the condensed version, start with the the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge.
DARPA, the advanced research arm of the Department of Defense, asked AI
developers to build a car that could travel 131 miles through the
dessert with no human input. That first year, no car made it more than
eight miles. But in 2005, five cars survived the trek, including the
winner out of Standford Unvesity, a modified Volkswagon Touareg named
Stanley. In 2007, DARPA issued a new challenge, to navigate city streets, and six cars succeeded in the task.
The winner, a modified Chevy built by engineers from Carnegie
Mellon, used cameras, lasers, and radar to build a virtual map of the
terrain on the fly. Meanwhile, top level decision making algorithms
were deciding strategy, like “stop at the intersection” and “Flip off
the cop” while another set of software managed the steering wheel and
pedals to actually accomplish those goals in light of the terrain map
and other traffic obstacles. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
But there’s still so much the cars can’t do: identify stop signs,
pedestrians, or cone zones, just to name a few, and then there’s the
problem of managing multiple obstacles at once. That’s why the guys who
are expert in these cars say we’re probably a couple of decades away
from telling KITT to go park himself. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
Not to worry, there are a couple of neat things that have become
automated in recent years. Remember those Lexus commercials with the
car that parks itself? Those were for real.
The driver stll has to manage the breaks and gas, but after lingin up
the car for the spot, the car takes over the steering wheel and
executes the kind of perfect parrallel park most of us couldn’t manage
on our driver’s tests. And then there’s adaptive cruise control
that detects when the car is approaching an obstacle and slows down.
These are baby steps, to be sure, but as the saying goes, you have to
walk before you can get the self-driving car to go pick up the pizza.
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