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posted by chromas on Friday May 25 2018, @12:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-want-to-drive-in-the-other-lane;-I-want-to-merge-like-humans-do dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In the field of self-driving cars, algorithms for controlling lane changes are an important topic of study. But most existing lane-change algorithms have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyze on the fly; or they're so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as never changing lanes at all.

At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation tomorrow, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new lane-change algorithm that splits the difference. It allows for more aggressive lane changes than the simple models do but relies only on immediate information about other vehicles' directions and velocities to make decisions.

[...] One standard way for autonomous vehicles to avoid collisions is to calculate buffer zones around the other vehicles in the environment. The buffer zones describe not only the vehicles' current positions but their likely future positions within some time frame. Planning lane changes then becomes a matter of simply staying out of other vehicles' buffer zones.

[...] With the MIT researchers' system, if the default buffer zones are leading to performance that's far worse than a human driver's, the system will compute new buffer zones on the fly — complete with proof of collision avoidance.

Let me know when someone finds an algorithm that can deal with unknown situations as intuitively as human beings can. Until then...

Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/driverless-cars-change-lanes-like-human-drivers-0523


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  • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday May 25 2018, @12:33PM (7 children)

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Friday May 25 2018, @12:33PM (#683982)

    Let me know when someone finds an algorithm that can deal with unknown situations as intuitively as human beings can. Until then...

    Given the massive numbers of people who die in accidents each year you are not setting the bar very high here.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @12:44PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @12:44PM (#683986) Journal

    Even with the bar that low, we'll be looking for a long time they'll be able to pass over it.

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    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday May 25 2018, @05:54PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday May 25 2018, @05:54PM (#684106) Homepage

      Given the numbers for actual miles driven by self-driving cars, the number of collisions per miles driven (even including Uber's questionable engineering), the number of successful human interventions per miles driven (compared to actual humans who are on autopilot most of the time), and the fact that self-driving cars are already driving normal people on public roads (in case you weren't paying attention), they passed that bar a long time ago.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @12:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @12:53PM (#683988)

    Let me know when someone finds an algorithm that can deal with unknown situations as intuitively as human beings can. Until then...

    Stop resisting! Dead or alive, you're coming with me!

    That was easy. Next?

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 25 2018, @12:57PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @12:57PM (#683990)

    I googled up "National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey Report to Congress" or similar (I've read it before, its a NHTSA pub) and found the 2008 PDF pretty easily and about 145 deaths per year are from lane changes.

    We've been averaging fifty lightning strike deaths per year for a long time, so dying because of lane changes is about three times more likely than lightning strike.

    Of course a huge percentage of accidents involve people not driving their car, mere passenger, due to being high, drunk, phone, radio, talking, just generally not paying attention, which is pretty safe and works well thousands of times without issue until someone ends up dead. So an algo that simply issues "sleep(5000);" randomly once in awhile won't do much worse than a human car occupant (can't really call them drivers).

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 25 2018, @03:20PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 25 2018, @03:20PM (#684047)

      I wonder what the corresponding rate of accidents that *would have happened* if one of the drivers hadn't rapidly changed lanes is. Just this morning I had a guy pull out right in front of me from a cross-street that I had to dodge. In the far lane. Nice

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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday May 25 2018, @07:52PM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday May 25 2018, @07:52PM (#684171) Journal

      That lane change accidents don't cause that many deaths (simply because they happen at low relative speeds relative to each participant) , hardly justifies hand waiving them away as insignificant. They often tie up multiple lanes of traffic, cause injuries, and a lot of damage. Further more they have a habit of mushrooming into vehicle events involving more than the original two vehicles involved.

      The instant karma lane change you see quite often in Russian Dash-Cam videos is the jerk who tries to cut off a much larger vehicle, ends up doing the pit maneuver upon his own vehicle when his back end contacts the trucks front bumper, and he gets pushed sideways in front of the truck, and shoved down the highway for as long as the truck driver thinks he can get away with pretending an in-ability to stop his big rig.

      Nobody gets killed. But jerk gets his entire car bashed up, four tires ripped from rims, and gets a terror ride sideways down the highway.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday May 25 2018, @02:47PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday May 25 2018, @02:47PM (#684032)

    Yeah, what immediately sprang to mind in response was that old chestnut:
    "When in trouble or in doubt run in circles scream and shout"

    Pretty sure it won't take much AI to outperform that...