[msb-alumni] Google Testing Car for Weird Situations
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 14:51:31 -0400
BlankGoogle car testing for weird situations By Greg Gardner, Detroit Free
Press Google is concentrating its autonomous car testing on the more difficult
and unpredictable scenarios that crop up on surface streets more often than on
freeways. Speaking at the Automated Vehicle Symposium Wednesday in Ypsilanti,
Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving cars, showed a variety of
scenes the cars have confronted on surface streets around the company's
Mountain, View, Calif. headquarters. One case featured a duck scampering across
an intersection followed by a woman in an electric-powered wheelchair going
back and forth, in apparent pursuit of the duck. "It doesn't matter how long
you gave me, I never would have come up with that scenario. There are no rules.
The DMV has nothing in its handbook," Urmson said. The car must have the
ability to determine "this is weird. I'm just going to chill out here and let
that all play out. But human drivers might watch the path of the woman and the
duck and proceed if they think they see a safe opening. The Google car will
simply wait until its cameras and sensors don't notice any impediment. Urmson
showed another example where three lanes of traffic were about to proceed from
an intersection as the light turned green. The Google car was in the far right
lane. But coming from the left was a bicyclist who was determined to shoot
through the intersection despite a red light in his direction. The first two
human-driven cars moved forward forcing the cyclist to swerve toward the middle
of the intersection to avoid them. The Google car held its position because one
of its sensors picked up the cyclist's speed and concluded it was about to bolt
through the intersection. But this extra degree of caution, at this stage in
the technology's development, creates another level of risk. Google has begun
reporting accidents involving its vehicles. It turns out they have been
involved in 14 minor accidents over more than 1.8 million miles of testing. But
the company insists that the self-driving cars did not cause one of the
collisions. "There's been a lot of noise recently in the press about the fact
that our vehicles have been in collision," Urmson said. He then showed a video
of one the recent accidents where the Google car had to stop because of other
vehicles stopped in front of it. Meanwhile the car behind it didn't notice the
stopped vehicles and rammed into the Google car. That illustrates one of the
unsolved challenges before autonomous vehicles enter the mainstream of our
mobility networks. Yes they can be programmed to be as safe as possible given
the immediate space around it. As Urmson himself said, "People are going to be
people. Ideally human-driver vehicles will be equipped with enough sensors,
cameras and software to override human mistakes. But we aren't there yet.
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