Korean Competition Shows Weather Still a Challenge for Autonomous Cars

On HN I frequently see comments to the effect that self-driving cars will be commercially available in a decade or two, and that they will be safer than human-driven cars. Personally, I question whether either is true, and I strongly doubt that both can be true at once.<p>Humans have a lot of shortcomings--emotions, sleepiness, distraction, the effects of drugs and alcohol--but humans have some amazing strengths too. We&#x27;ve got cognitive abilities in recognizing patterns and making decisions that were honed by millions of years of evolution, and directly trained by, on average, decades of actually driving cars. I think it&#x27;s easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths.<p>We barely have fully-autonomous self-flying planes today, and I don&#x27;t know of any research showing that they are safer than human-piloted planes. And flying is a far less complicated domain to automate than driving.

One of the worst combination of weather related road conditions I&#x27;ve been in -- fog and ice, at night, in the mountains.<p>A self driving car wouldn&#x27;t have to work very hard here to do better than me.<p>* Check for weather conditions at altitude (not just start and destination points).<p>* Refuse to leave the house using that route if weather conditions are bad.<p>Oh well, lesson learned. On that topic does anyone know of maps software that does that for you -- i.e. check weather not just traffic?

Just drove about 8 hours and experienced heavy fog along the way. Visibility was reduced to maybe a hundred yards. The entire time I wasn&#x27;t thinking &quot;self-driving cars would fail here&quot; but rather that a self driving car with it&#x27;s multitude of sensors would probably do much better considering what it could &quot;see&quot; and also the reduction in &quot;eye fatigue&quot; as driving in heavy fog can wreak havoc on your eyes and perception of movement (not a problem for a computer).

I was thinking about this when driving in the recent rain here in California. A lot of data &#x27;goes away&#x27; and sometimes I relied on memory of what was there rather than actively see what was there to navigate. I haven&#x27;t seen any discussion on whether or not auto-cars would have some sort of equivalent to a &#x27;muscle memory&#x27; of where they have been driving to help them over the rough patches.<p>In the test case, if the car recognized &quot;oh this is the course from yesterday, even though it doesn&#x27;t quite look like it, its in the same GPS coordinates&quot; and then try to match larger easier to spot landmarks with its previous experience. That would certainly help it out.

Which companies had cars here? I&#x27;ve been impressed with some European car makers and their self-driving cars, especially Volvo. They seem to make cars that handles true driving conditions, while American makers have idealized conditions, especially the Google car.

a guy in our group did clear path detection for vehicles using only vision - his biggest hurdles were shadows and rain<p>his thesis was awesome though, he created shadow and rain drop removal while also mitigating the effects of &#x27;smeared headlights&#x27; from a wet road at night

I&#x27;ve seen the Google self driving car on the roads on Mountain View and Los Altos since the current storms started. Clearly they are taking advantage of the weather conditions for data.

Living in a cold, snowy climate, it seems like self driving cars will never be possible here.<p>Winter snow removal equipment scrapes the lines off the roads requiring re-application every summer in my area, and a common sight in the cities is the &quot;re-positioning&quot; of lanes during the winter. Drivers carve out their own lanes in the snow, so a 4 lane road might have only 3 lanes in the winter. I find this challenging to negotiate in the winter as no one seems sure whether they should follow the carved out path or be in the actual lane, assuming they know where it is under the packed snow. How could a self-driving car deal with that?<p>Not to mention inconsistent, icy road surfaces with unpredictable traction and the springtime muck of snow&#x2F;gravel&#x2F;salt that makes keeping the windshield clean, much less exterior sensors and cameras.

To be fair, wet roads confuse human-driven cars, too.

And my earliest iPhone&#x27;s were pretty poor at getting a GPS signal and drained my battery like a madman. Within 3 years that had all changed dramatically. So I&#x27;m not sure how much weight I place on current results in an area advancing so rapidly.

I&#x27;d imagine it&#x27;s more challenging when the road is covered in snow and the snowplows haven&#x27;t gotten to it yet.

Won&#x27;t infrared sensors work well here?

What will snow do?...

One of the most important things I learned very early in my CS schooling was that data (or problem) representation is, by far, the most important step to solving a problem computationally. Your computing platform, compiler, language, editor, memory size, speed, etc. cannot compensate for bad representation.<p>While I recognize the amount of work and smarts that has gone into self driving cars it is my humble opinion that the typical approach being taken is fundamentally flawed.<p>The right approach, again, in my humble opinion, is to change the representation of the problem: Roads have to be smart. Cars smarter, yes, but roads need to be modified for robots. Change the problem you are trying to solve and the solution might just become massively simpler.<p>Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking lots and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are around to make it worth their while to install the technology.<p>When my kids were younger they had huge problems opening doors around the house that were equipped with spherical handles. If their hands were wet after washing them, even worst. So, we changed the problem: We installed lever type door handles and even the youngest kid with hands full of soap could open the door now.<p>But, hey, what do I know.