MIT Invented a Tool That Allows Driverless Cars To Navigate Rural Roads Without a Map (vice.com) 69
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) is developing new technology, called MapLite, that eliminates the need for maps in self-driving car technology altogether. This could more easily enable a fleet-sharing model that connects carless rural residents and would facilitate intercity trips that run through rural areas. In a paper posted online on May 7 by CSAIL and project partner Toyota, 30-year-old PhD candidate Teddy Ort -- along with co-authors Liam Paull and Daniela Rus -- detail how using LIDAR (a radar-like sensor that uses lasers instead of radio waves to measure distances) and GPS together can enable self-driving cars to navigate on rural roads without having a detailed map to guide them. The team was able to drive down a number of unpaved roads in rural Massachusetts and reliably scan the road for curves and obstacles up to 100 feet ahead, according to the paper.
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I'm more worried about the cases on rural roads where the surface sometimes is soft and cars will get stuck severely on the road trying to drive where it shouldn't.
Big deal - so did Uber (Score:3)
When you eliminate the requirement to avoid running into things, the problem gets a LOT simpler!
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Actually it's only about 1/8th of a second of lag as I recall - at least sending signals to the hand, might take slightly longer to the foot. Classic example - have someone rest their hand on a table, extending their fingers past the edge, with thumb and forefinger poised to grab the midpoint of a dollar bill as soon as it's dropped. It's physically impossible to do so as the bill takes ~1/10th of a second to fall half it's length, and thus is safely clear before the signal gets from eye to brain and then
good movie idea (Score:2)
As someone.... (Score:2)
I've lost way too damned many friends and fam to "bitterly cling" to my self-driving car.
And I say this as a proud former owner of a 1970 Ford Torino Cobra with the 429 CJ engine, shaker hood and rear window louvers (came THIS close to getting a Boss 429 Mustang), 4-speed manual, etc. Fun times.
Things are different today, t
Re: As someone.... (Score:2)
...AND has been an advocate for this kind of technology long before it was remotely feasible
So you're a moron... AND it's okay because... why, again??
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Re: As someone.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty much everything a computer does we can do. We program them to do it. There are plenty of things that computers can do faster and better though. Hopefully self driving cars becomes on of those. If you donâ(TM)t think self driving cars are worth it, you arenâ(TM)t thinking big enough. Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park. Thatâ(TM)s the type of thing that is possible once we have self driving cars. Not to mention the price of a taxi drops considerably as does the cost of shipped goods. There are likely tons of spin off technologies we havenâ(TM)t even imagined yet that will become possible and cost effective once we have self driving vehicles.
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Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park.
That would be a pretty boring trip.
Part of the fun of doing a car trip is having to navigate, finding unexpected things en route and stopping to see them, etc.
Driving a car is so much fun, why would you want to miss that and sleep instead?
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I'll never get why people are so hung up on self-driving cars. Either drive yourself or hire a taxi. We should focus on making computers do stuff that we can't do ourselves.
I know how to do addition, but if you ask me to tally up a million records it's going to take a while and have errors. So there's plenty reason to make computers do what we do if they do it better. Sure replacing car drivers with self-driving cars might seem a bit pedestrian, like replacing a bunch of people with calculators with a computer. But there's more than a billion of them. Sure you can find lots of things to automate that affect a thousand people. Some that affect a million people. But there's very
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> I'll never get why people are so hung up on self-driving cars. Either drive yourself or hire a taxi. We should focus on making computers do stuff that we can't do ourselves.
Like driving?
I have a lot of older aunts and uncles who are quickly losing their ability to safely drive themselves to doctors appointments, grocery shopping, etc, and either live in a village so small that there's no taxi around, or they simply can't afford the service. Their (adult) kids' work schedules don't necessarily allow th
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Whoever has your balls, should at least give you visitation.
lasers instead of radio waves (Score:2)
... LIDAR (a radar-like sensor that uses lasers instead of radio waves to measure distances) ...
(sigh)
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Like LIDAR is cutting edge or something.
Come on, it's not 3D printed rocket science...
(but that may come up soon)
Re:lasers instead of radio waves (Score:4, Informative)
> it's not 3D printed rocket science...(but that may come up soon)
Actually it's been going up for just under a decade, longer if you don't insist on reaching orbit. The Falcon 1 Flight 4 reached orbit September 28, 2008 using its 3D printed engine components.
This is good (Score:2)
I'm just surprised that this kind of navigational problem wasn't made a part of the baseline autonomous car requirements. You might think that unmarked, poorly mapped roads are part of a rural setting. But we've go crap like that right in town. And self driving cars are going to have to deal with it.
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"I'm just surprised that this kind of navigational problem wasn't made a part of the baseline autonomous car requirements."
Me too. I don't see how an autonomous vehicle can handle construction zones, parking garages, or GPS "dead zones" without this sort of technology.
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Me too. I don't see how an autonomous vehicle can handle construction zones, parking garages, or GPS "dead zones" without this sort of technology.
To handle construction zones, a level 5 vehicle will need advanced information about the construction zone. That means that construction workers are going to have to place beacons. That will become the law sooner or later. A level 4 or lesser vehicle will just expect you to take over.
As for the rest, a level 5 vehicle will simply refuse to go anywhere it doesn't understand, while again, a level 4 or lesser vehicle will expect you to take over. A level 4 vehicle should give you lots of notice.
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That means that construction workers are going to have to place beacons.
The power to the hospital is out. A tree fell across the lines.
"Sorry. But we don't have our beacons with us. And we can't push an update to The Cloud. Because a tree fell across the lines and communications are down. You'll just have to wait."
a level 5 vehicle will simply refuse to go anywhere it doesn't understand
Suits me. Just keep those shitboxes off the roads. And good luck surviving through even a minor storm when a bit of high water or some (otherwise navigable) debris falling in the roadway keeps people housebound and starving to death.
Significant improvement. (Score:2)
This is a step in the right direction. Instead of relying on ultrahigh precision LIDAR maps, they now rely on basic map data your GPS nav unit would have + LIDAR for local information. What this really means is that the level of reliance on LIDAR has dropped significantly. Elon musk called LIDAR a crutch and this, for the most part, ditches that crutch because it's capable of operating in an "unstructured area" (place that hasn't previously been mapped) by using it's "local" sensor (LIDAR in this case) t
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It previously relied on models generated using detailed point cloud data. The real show stopper will be when it can recognize gravel and dirt roads that aren't on any maps.
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Yes. It seems they don't have much more than a flatness detector algorithm to point the car to where the 'road' is in rural areas.
This is not new (Score:5, Informative)
None of this work is new, CMU and others were doing this 20 years ago. And we were using it on the Unmanned Ground Vehicles Project. We were not using GPS, but Neural Network Road following outdoors without roads with LIDAR and with cooperative robotic HUMVEE vehicles.
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I've been in downpours/hail that had everybody pulled over and hiding under overpasses. I'd be impressed if the autonomous car had the sense.
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Hmmm. I wonder it Uber vehicles can distinguish a pedestrian from a tumbleweed? Perhaps that explains mowing the former down.
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Just don't forget to turn off the car before removing the football, or you may find it has resumed driving without you.
navigate? without map? (Score:3)
So...does it stop a lot to ask for directions?
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So...does it stop a lot to ask for directions?
Maybe it keeps one hand on the left wall at all times ...
Oncoming Traffic (Score:2)
Wake me when it can do this (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So MIT invented the horse? (Score:2)
They must party like it's 1899 over there...