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posted by martyb on Monday July 31 2017, @01:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the taken-for-a-ride dept.

An autonomous Lexus RX hybrid completed its 5,300-plus mile, round-trip cross-country journey at Virginia's Executive Mansion on Wednesday afternoon.

For the bulk of the trip, the vehicle drove more than 4,300 miles autonomously.

The self-driving vehicle, programmed by Blacksburg-based Torc Robotics, started its journey July 7 in Washington, D.C., headed west to Seattle, returned east to Richmond and was greeted by Gov. Terry McAuliffe in Capitol Square.

[...] Three certified safety drivers and one Torc engineer went on the cross-country trip. The safety drivers rotated time behind the wheel for the duration of the trip to assist the car in case of emergency.

Along the nearly three-week journey, Torc Robotics CEO and co-founder Michael Fleming said, many people photographed the vehicle, which is equipped with a large, spinning lidar (light detection and ranging) system mounted to the roof, an array of radar, video cameras and two GPS antennas. Radar systems also are hidden inside bumpers.

Inside the car, the only noticeable modification is the addition of a tablet mounted on the center console. All the car's sensors feed data into a computer in a compartment below the trunk.

The dashboard has three indicator lights: green to let the driver know all is going well; yellow appears when the car detects a minor obstacle that the driver should know about; and red for when it's time to hand controls back over to the driver.

This was not Torc's first long-distance test. One of the company's cars logged over a 1,000 miles during a round trip from its headquarters in Blacksburg to the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit — the birthplace of the Model T.

Why has no one christened any of these cars "Herbie" or "Ocho" yet?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday July 31 2017, @07:29AM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Monday July 31 2017, @07:29AM (#547017) Homepage

    I agree totally. And I imagine anywhere where the road isn't well-defined, or there are lots of hazards (e.g. people walking out between traffic, does that happen in the US?).

    That also brings to my mind regional variation. A self-driving car "trained" (let's not go there, but it's not) to work in the US where you have jaywalking laws, etc. - how would that fare in the UK (where we don't), or even India (where it can be pretty much a free-for-all)?

    Not to mention things like unmarked roads (I drive down one to work every morning, and I live in London - not everything is strictly defined and painted or could be afforded to be made so), cheap car-parks (it doesn't understand what spaces are), etc.

    Our roads are built for humans (lines are spaced to provide a sense of speed appropriate to the road, etc.). Making computers drive like humans to use those roads is ridiculously difficult. Sure, we could change them and make them suitable for computers, but then you'd have the expense and the opposite problem where humans weren't able to use them properly.

    As time goes by, people are also going to take more risks if they don't already. It's the old "I feel safe, so I'll go faster" but in this case "I feel safe, so I'll walk out in front of this car which I 'know' will stop", etc.

    Autonomous cars are fine on autonomous roads. We don't have those. I see a future much more like "personal trains that can take a variety of routes" than autonomous cars driving through crowds of humans or even, as in one experience I had, sheep (yep, drive round a bend, at the national speed limit, and see a flock of sheep taking up the entire road and not a human in sight).

    Autonomous cars will work fine until the first exception. And then it has no clue how to deal with it, whereas a human would. By then, if these companies get their way, however, the only human present won't know how to deal with it (e.g. be a child, etc. which is what they're selling these cars on - let it take your kids to school, etc.).

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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday July 31 2017, @07:34AM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday July 31 2017, @07:34AM (#547020)

    I think these small outfits are just hoping to get eaten up by the big wigs (google uber et al). So the real question is how many patents do they own and what is the value?