On 17/10/2019 09.56, Roland Hughes wrote: > This presents the perfect challenge. Once "The Mother Road" it is now > difficult to navigate having many turns, stops and 30 MPH stretches. > Most importantly there are huge sections without cellular/wireless > coverage. Some sections satellite coverage doesn't work. The vehicle > will have to retain all of the knowledge it needs for the trip because > updates will be sparse.
I think you overestimate the difficulty of doing this. My ten year old car has maps of the entire US in onboard memory. IIRC it fits on a single DVD. Yes, this is now 10 years out of date, and doesn't include things like speed limits, but I doubt we're talking about an amount of data that can't fit on a single SSD. The car knows where it is from a combination of GPS, inertial guidance, and the assumption that it is on a road. Combine this with the car *knowing* what it is trying to do and being able to actually "see" the road and street signs, and you have a system that should be able to navigate at least as well as a human under most conditions. This isn't guessing, it's experience... based on technology that was close to mainstream *ten years ago*. BTW, I believe Google Navigation has already solved the "retain the data you need for the whole trip" problem. Combine this with some form of version control system so that the vehicle can frequently download updates for its entire operational area, and I just don't see how "spotty network coverage" is going to be an issue. (Maybe for someone who *lives* in an area with no coverage. Well, such people may just not be able to use autonomous vehicles. I doubt that is going to deter the folks working on AV's.) Yes, situations will come up that it can't handle, at which point it will have to get the human involved. Until we have something approaching "real AI", that will be the case. That said, I like your viability test :-). -- Matthew _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
