abc
Well-known member
Why haven't anyone come up with a self-driving snowmobile yet?
Backyard cat skiing anyone?
Backyard cat skiing anyone?
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Will driverless cars help remote resorts?
- Thread starter legalskier
- Start date
abc
Well-known member
How long is a long way away? Years? Decades? How many years? How many decades?
benski
Active member
It also sucks that your car Volvo hides the on off button in the settings menus. I can turn that off as soon as I see something wrong on the road.
I think we will begin to see some highway capacity improvement pretty quickly from these new features. Adaptive cruise control helps reduce rubbernecking and increase threw-put.
I think for ski areas busses are more realistic, except for a few ski areas near rail lines. Rail lines are very expensive to build so they don’t make sense if usage is lower. I think ski areas should work harder to push busses as a way to access the resort. Most don’t do anything of the sort.
SkiingInABlueDream
Active member
This is the only post sofar that doesn't sound like pie in the sky fantasy.
And the ppl who are trying to use current "self driving" features on snowy roads... You folks scare me.
speden
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I agree fully self driving cars are still science fiction, but they can use a lot more than just cameras to see where the road is. Most of them have extremely detailed maps of the roads, so if they know their exact position, then they can know where the road is without even seeing it. Who knows what else they can come up with, like snow penetrating radar or something. So technically self driving cars are feasible, it's just going to take a while to make them safe and reliable.
The biggest barrier now is that the current generation of artificial intelligence isn't good at generalizing. It's very good at learning specific things, but if it encounters a variation on what it's learned, then it gets confused. So if you teach it what a pedestrian looks like and what a rabbit looks like, and then a person in a rabbit suit is walking across the street, the car might decide it's just a rabbit. The AI just lacks common sense and depth of experience to say, "hmmm, that's too big to be a rabbit". The last two fatalities from self driving cars happened when the AI thought a big white truck blocking the road was just the sky, and a woman crossing the street with a bicycle was just a bicycle.
The biggest barrier now is that the current generation of artificial intelligence isn't good at generalizing. It's very good at learning specific things, but if it encounters a variation on what it's learned, then it gets confused. So if you teach it what a pedestrian looks like and what a rabbit looks like, and then a person in a rabbit suit is walking across the street, the car might decide it's just a rabbit. The AI just lacks common sense and depth of experience to say, "hmmm, that's too big to be a rabbit". The last two fatalities from self driving cars happened when the AI thought a big white truck blocking the road was just the sky, and a woman crossing the street with a bicycle was just a bicycle.
So its ok for the car to hit a bicycle as long as nobody is riding it?
Hah! I was thinking that exact same thing!
abc
Well-known member
Buses are cruising up to ski resorts in large numbers!
But you need to live where the buses are leaving from. Plenty of people do, in Boston and New York city.
Where else can you run a bus FROM that has enough population to fill it???
I love cars and love to drive. But I don't like fighting traffic on a Friday evening going up north. I'd gladly hand the controls over the car and let it drive for me.
I listen to a bunch of car podcasts and have heard a lot of talk on this subject:
It would be easy to transition to fully autonomous if it happened quickly. As in on XXXX date, all cars on the road will be autonomous. The conundrum will be the mix of autonomous and human driven cars.
Weather: Snow messes with sensors. I'm sure having a system where the vehicles talk to each other and the infrastructure would lessen this. The hurdle there would be communication; re the thread near this one that talks about cell service(or lack thereof) in VT.
The whole ownership model with autonomous vehicles has the potential to change. If you have a vehicle that drives itself, why park it? Let it run around for 18 hours + a day. Who knows, we may not need to own a vehicle years from now. You'd just hail it when you need it...kinda like Uber.
I think another potential down the road disruption would be autonomous vertical take off vehicles. They look like giant drones. Imagine the time that would cut out of the equation.
I listen to a bunch of car podcasts and have heard a lot of talk on this subject:
It would be easy to transition to fully autonomous if it happened quickly. As in on XXXX date, all cars on the road will be autonomous. The conundrum will be the mix of autonomous and human driven cars.
Weather: Snow messes with sensors. I'm sure having a system where the vehicles talk to each other and the infrastructure would lessen this. The hurdle there would be communication; re the thread near this one that talks about cell service(or lack thereof) in VT.
The whole ownership model with autonomous vehicles has the potential to change. If you have a vehicle that drives itself, why park it? Let it run around for 18 hours + a day. Who knows, we may not need to own a vehicle years from now. You'd just hail it when you need it...kinda like Uber.
I think another potential down the road disruption would be autonomous vertical take off vehicles. They look like giant drones. Imagine the time that would cut out of the equation.
speden
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Depends on what kind of bike it is.
I was kind of glossing over the details on that accident. Apparently they had tuned the software to try to reduce false positives, so that the car wouldn't slam on the brakes over phantom objects that weren't really a threat. The car detected that something was there, but it wasn't sure what it was, and decided to ignore it. I suspect if the woman had been crossing the street without the bicycle, then it would have stopped for her. If the bicycle had been parked in the middle of the road by itself, then the car would have driven around it. It would have also gone around her if she'd been riding the bike. But a woman pushing a bike across the street in the dark wasn't recognizable to the car since it couldn't generalize the different objects that it knew to understand this novel situation it wasn't trained on.
Depends on what kind of bike it is.
I was kind of glossing over the details on that accident. Apparently they had tuned the software to try to reduce false positives, so that the car wouldn't slam on the brakes over phantom objects that weren't really a threat. The car detected that something was there, but it wasn't sure what it was, and decided to ignore it. I suspect if the woman had been crossing the street without the bicycle, then it would have stopped for her. If the bicycle had been parked in the middle of the road by itself, then the car would have driven around it. It would have also gone around her if she'd been riding the bike. But a woman pushing a bike across the street in the dark wasn't recognizable to the car since it couldn't generalize the different objects that it knew to understand this novel situation it wasn't trained on.
I don't mean to make light about any accidents or injuries caused by driverless technology. But it does interest me that these accidents become front page news. The standard by which driverless technology should be judged is that of human driving. So far, every statistic that I've seen has suggested that while we still have a long way to go, driverless technology tests already outperform humans. In general, humans are bad drivers.
I drive all the time (don't have a choice) and I freely admit that I'm an average driver (skillwise). People tend to want to judge driveless technology against the standard of perfect. And we all know that human drivers aren't perfect. My mother-in-law is a sweet, kind, caring person. And if you asked me, she's such a bad driver, she should have her license revoked. Consistently drives 10+ mph below the speed limit. Comes to a stop at most intersections regardless of whether there is a traffic light or stop sign. Bottom line, she's dangerous on the road. Give me today's (not even future versions) driverless technology over her any day of the week.
abc
Well-known member
I'm not aware of the part of reducing false positive.Depends on what kind of bike it is.
I was kind of glossing over the details on that accident. Apparently they had tuned the software to try to reduce false positives, so that the car wouldn't slam on the brakes over phantom objects that weren't really a threat. The car detected that something was there, but it wasn't sure what it was, and decided to ignore it. I suspect if the woman had been crossing the street without the bicycle, then it would have stopped for her. If the bicycle had been parked in the middle of the road by itself, then the car would have driven around it. It would have also gone around her if she'd been riding the bike. But a woman pushing a bike across the street in the dark wasn't recognizable to the car since it couldn't generalize the different objects that it knew to understand this novel situation it wasn't trained on.
But if that's true, that's truly disturbing. They're testing their software using general public, real people as guinea pigs!
They don't allow that in medical research. But I guess that's acceptable for computer software?
speden
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They are required to have an actual driver at the wheel during these tests, but in this case the driver was looking at her smartphone when the accident happened, which of course they aren't allowed to do, but since the cars hardly ever mess up, that must be a super boring job where your attention would wander.
I think the self-driving cars will be held to a radically higher standard than human drivers. Humans are what they are, but cars are technology, and technology can always be made better with more sensors, more CPU processing power, etc. So unless the gov makes some carve outs to protect the auto manufacturers, they will need a super low accident rate to avoid lawsuits. Also people will not trust the cars if they hear about accidents.
Another exactly.
This attitude is what terrifies me.
So driverless cars are preferable to cautious drivers who stay below the speed limit and follow all traffic directions? WOW!
WWF-VT
Well-known member
You guys that are doing these long drives and think a driveress car makes sense should figure out how to make a few friends and share the task of driving on your weekend treks to ski country. Do you really want to be asleep when your driverless car winds up in a ditch on a snowy backroad ?
Stopping at intersections with no stop sign or traffic light where you have the right of way is not a "cautious" driver following traffic directions. That's outright dangerous.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I also don't think it is acceptable either for a driverless car to have anything less than a near perfect standard of safety and accuracy before they are allowed. Being "as good as humans" is not good enough.
ThinkSnow
Member
+1 Add to that drivers with the right-of-way who simply decide to stop to let opposing traffic make left turns, for no logical reason.
That was my point which I expressed poorly, driverless cars that are as "good as humans" are a total waste because that is a horribly low standard.
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