Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Wyndham
Me, either...at least if there is, it's minimal - I noticed the DIC started blinking just before it chose "a lane". But I haven't driven one, so it's very hard to say...Though, if I recall, there was a drive who did NOT pay attention while autopilot was engaged (shame on Tesla for the name of that system, by the way), and either got into a nasty accident, or got killed.
I guess what I meant there was my interpretation of what went wrong...the car appeared to "chose a lane" that most closely appeared to be the way the navigation system wanted it to go. It just so happened that the "lane" was the divider stripes leading to the barrier.
This could have been because the camera didn't properly detect the lines on the road?
A human could have seen that wasn't a lane...a computer can't, unless it was programmed for that particular instance. And even then - it can only function based on the inputs it is provides...we can see a crappy-looking line on the road and still determine what it's supposed to mean. 
I believe the programming these companies are putting into the cars are attempting to mimic human decision-making on the road. In this case, it failed. |
My guess is that the camera was following the lane-lines & kept the car between them, just like its supposed to 99.99% of the time. But it didn't know to follow the right-hand markers when pulling off the highway (or follow the left if going straight). And they certainly didn't seem to understand that the plotted course was heading straight for a stationary object. All of this aught to be relatively straight forward to solve. None of it is beyond the technology currently available. But it might be beyond Tesla's Autopilot.
I've fiddled around with machine vision systems enough to know that they are capable of amazing accuracy, and incredible idiocity. The algorithms used by a system to recognize objects are so alien to how people think that I can't believe anyone in their right mind would program a vision system to drive a car at 70 mph.