July 27th, 2015: Mcity, Michigan

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I get it, but... they painted it to look like a city block to humans. That's so fuckin' funny.

University researcher: "And today we shall see how an automated car deals with our precise simulation that looks and feels exactly like a real city block. I'm switching on the car now..."

Google Car: "That's strange, someone has put up something that looks like buildings but, according to my laser radar, is entirely flat... let's see what else we got. GPS says we're in the middle of an abandoned warehouse... Galileo confirms. Three mobile towers and two known Wifi signals confirm our general location as well. There's a signal light where there isn't supposed to be one... it's not to any code for this area, so we absolutely must assume it's a fake. At the end of this block is an uncontrolled intersection where there can't be one. Mark that as an issue and let's have a human come out and detail it. But worst of all, government records show no private roads and the nearest actual road is 200 yards north. Let's just park and throw an error until we at least get a new map."

first of all, pretty funny.

next, I wonder how far an autonomous car's "vision" for lack of a better word needs to extend to get somewhere... does it need a map for the entire route? That kind of makes sense, but I don't always need a map, I mean, an understanding of exactly which uninterrupted stretch of pavement will take me from A to B. How will these cars handle unexpected obstacles. Duh, this is the kind of environment used to test the algorithms designed to let the car work out such problems.

this is really interesting stuff.