Autonomous Cars - Are They Realistic?

[Vman455]

On 90/94 yesterday in rush hour traffic, a Model 3 got behind me. I noticed the driver didn't have his hands on the wheel, was looking out the window or at his cell phone most of the time, so he must have been using Autopilot. The Model 3 maintained a car length distance or so behind me, and if I moved up just a few feet and stopped it didn't budge. I felt much more comfortable with the computer driving behind me than the Silverado HD later who insisted on getting as close to my bumper as possible every time traffic stopped.

[hayden55]

You can actually accomplish a lot of this yourself. I've seen a guy control his epas through an arduino board through the comma ai unit with its camera's, sensors, and gps. He made a electric motor mount to control his hydraulic steering shaft and low and behold it did it. it was funny hearing the servo react to steering inputs though, but nonetheless. This isn't as necessary now with newer cars though as most already have EPAS and just lack the radar plate for distance control. Which brings me to the next point where they guy rigged up a radar plate to some relays which controlled the cruise control to maintain a follow distance of 1.8 seconds behind the car in front, and target speed was the speed limit if no obstacles were detected.
But the city aspect is the monster. We are actually working on it as a research project right now. Basically a neural network, and taking data from the cameras to detect obstactles irl as fast and accurately as possible. We'll see what happens... haha
I'm a mech e student with a serious lack of I T coding experience.

I'll try and tag the videos. One of the guys actually reached out to me on a forum after we had talk about his video. Crazy how small the world is now with the internet. Also, what is crazy is a year ago when I looked at all of this there wasn't many results or hits, but now youtube is flooded with videos on this topic and diy'ers.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by hayden55

But the city aspect is the monster.

Really? Of course divided highways in rush hour traffic are easy, but I'd think that city streets would be much easier than rural roads - and that's before you take weather and critters into account.

[redpoint5]

I find city streets to lack basic road markings, hide stop signs behind trees or dumpsters, and generally be chaotic. In Las Vegas, there was a continuous stream of people crossing a driveway entrance, and I was blocking the road waiting to make my turn. With a police cruiser watching, I slowly crept through the crowd, parting the people around the vehicle. AI would never decide to drive through a crowd of people.

[Joggernot]

For self driving cars (including current airplanes) read the book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry (2018). She has some interesting insights for the long term use of self driving cars as well as auto pilots in airplanes. Lots more stuff on algorithms currently in use that was also very interesting.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by hayden55

I've seen a guy control his epas through an arduino board through the comma ai unit with its camera's, sensors, and gps.

https://commaai.blogspot.com/

Just as they're working on robots to play futball, someone needs to make an adversarial generative AI to rock-crawl boulders.

[Grant-53]

Automated machines are useful in situations that are repetitive in nature. Many people will benefit from a self driving vehicles. The caution is that you should never let a machine do your thinking for you.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by Varn

There may be a lot easier things to automate than trying to make cars do what they are not suited for. The human brain is much more powerful and versatile than any computer. The experts are wrong.

Even in the aviation, not every airfield has support for those nearly-autonomous "flight directors" already widespread in major airliners.

[wdb]

Originally Posted by davis54

In one of my classes we had a visitor speaker talk about independent vehicles, he said at first there would likely be self-ruling just segments of interstate amid specific hours of the night. This would gradually grow until sooner or later in the far off future it would be basically all auto, constantly.

This sounds fairly realistic, unlike much of the hype that's been pushed of late.

I remember my son telling me "this is probably the last gasoline powered car I will ever buy; the next time I'm ready to purchase there will be so many electric choices." That was 10 years ago.

[hayden55]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Really? Of course divided highways in rush hour traffic are easy, but I'd think that city streets would be much easier than rural roads - and that's before you take weather and critters into account.

Yeah its one of those things that they have to wait to map out the rural roads, and until then it will be poor. But things are typically calmer and there are less factors to code for. This is why highway super cruise is such an easy feature to produce, also the grid lock mode of follow the car in front of you. But, In the city you have the chaos of city drivers being poor at following the rules, the pedestrians are cut throat as well, and there is a lot of environmental factors that are ever changing. It will get done, but thats where the hobbiest level probably stops. Its easy for a hobbiest to code out super cruise control for the highway, but trying to navigate the city takes a lot of miles to be logged.