Thread: Autonomous Vehicles

Originally Posted by Mick_Marsh

So, you are saying the corporations need a patsy to blame when something goes wrong.
For that reason alone, I will never travel in an autonomous car.

No, I'm saying these are only trials, so there has to be a backup system.

Vehicles that can talk to each other? Driverless cars to be tested in Adelaide CBD - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Hmm . Im basically blind without my contact lenses, I already have a graft & an implant, There will be a stage when I wont be able to fit my contacts , (glasses wont work with kerataconus) I hadn't looked at Autonomous cars this way before.

Originally Posted by goingbush

Hmm . Im basically blind without my contact lenses, I already have a graft & an implant, There will be a stage when I wont be able to fit my contacts , (glasses wont work with kerataconus) I hadn't looked at Autonomous cars this way before.

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It is unclear to me how a completely autonomous vehicle would find its way up a driveway to a house, or, indeed, how it would find addresses which are not mapped or have a misleading address (such as mine - according to the Geographical Names Board I live in a town 90km away by road, and most of the last 17km appears on maps as "unnamed road", and my 1.6km driveway and the last 3km of the road is unmapped. How do you describe to it an address such as this?

I think they'll have a long walk to your place then John. You don't even have to be that far off the beaten track for this - we have a genset running a new mobile phone tower about 200 metres off a main road - the road it is accessed from is a dirt road but services several farms, is well maintained and is clearly marked on Google maps - BUT - the end of the road doesn't show it is joined to the main road even though it is, so putting the address into a satnav or phone gives you a route that cannot be driven as it goes through said farms from the other end and isn't actually a road from the other end...

I'm sure there would be hundreds, if not thousands of these sort of issues on the current database.

Google Maps isn't the only road dataset available, and even that will improve once there is a greater need for it. Specifying a latitude and longitude for the destination and using highly accurate photo maps will probably get you there. And a bit of manual data interpretation before the trip too. Once it's been done once (even just by logging a human driver) every following AV will be able to do it too by sharing data.

A more pressing problem for autonomous vehicles is this: how will they handle opening and closing cocky gates? Not too many automatic ones of those Out West just yet.

Originally Posted by bee utey

Google Maps isn't the only road dataset available, and even that will improve once there is a greater need for it. Specifying a latitude and longitude for the destination and using highly accurate photo maps will probably get you there. And a bit of manual data interpretation before the trip too. Once it's been done once (even just by logging a human driver) every following AV will be able to do it too by sharing data.

But when human drivers are no longer allowed? I am sure there will be some way, but it seems that it would become much more difficult to drive to out of the way places. And there is no guarantee that autonomous vehicles will be able to share data - there are vast areas of this country with no mobile coverage, and there is also the factor of increasing resistance to sharing data as more and more abuses come to light.

A more pressing problem for autonomous vehicles is this: how will they handle opening and closing cocky gates? Not too many automatic ones of those Out West just yet.

Don't have to go out west. Consider the case of a suburban driver with a house with a garage that needs to be manually opened.

I don't know about "out west", but I know of no automatic gates anywhere near here. But there are a lot of gates - seven between here and the village. Almost every place out of town has at a minimum a boundary gate on the road.