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posted by LaminatorX on Monday May 11 2015, @06:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-mousetrap dept.

According to an article by the AP - via an ad-free site several of the self driving cars licensed to drive in California have been involved in accidents.

Most are slow speed accidents, apparently with no injuries.

Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads. Two accidents happened while the cars were in control; in the other two, the person who still must be behind the wheel was driving, a person familiar with the accident reports told The Associated Press.

Three involved Lexus SUVs that Google Inc. outfitted with sensors and computing power in its aggressive effort to develop "autonomous driving," a goal the tech giant shares with traditional automakers. The parts supplier Delphi Automotive had the other accident with one of its two test vehicles. Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor.

Neither the companies involved, nor the State of California will release details of these accidents, which rankles some critics.

Four accidents involving these 50 cars in 8 months may seem a little high. Google's 23 cars have driven 140,000 miles in that time and racked up 3 accidents all by them selves. That is an order of magnitude higher than the National Transportation Safety Board's figures of 0.3 per 100,000 for non injury accidents. However the NTSB doesn't collect all fender bender accidents.

The article says that none of the other states that permit self driving cars have any record of accidents.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday May 11 2015, @10:41PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Monday May 11 2015, @10:41PM (#181685) Journal

    Seems to me it'd be a combination of the two. There's certainly going to be some amount of rubbernecking, and I'm sure that doesn't help.

    It also occurred to me earlier today that the one thing autonomous vehicles will prevent others around them from doing is employing key #5 of the Smith System [yahoo.com], specifically the part about making eye contact (sorry about Yahoo answers, was the top result on Google). If I'm driving around a robo-car, how can I make sure it sees me? I can't make eye contact with the vision systems in use. I really just have to assume that the software is that good.

    Applying the 5 keys of the Smith System from the point of view of a robo-car:

    1. Aim high in steering: this should be trivial assuming the computer can accurately infer traffic 5 or 10 cars ahead of itself, although I can only assume this is a monster of a machine vision problem.
    2. Get the big picture: this is more difficult of a machine vision problem. Can these things even read standard street signs yet? What about the inevitable detour one encounters at least once a summer where half the signs are wrong?
    3. Keep your eyes moving: done and done. Caveat is just figuring out what it's seeing.
    4. Leave yourself an out: like aim high in steering, this should be trivial and will only be held back by machine vision.
    5. Make sure they see you: Ahhh... I'm imagining a paradise of being surrounded by robo-cars that always use their blinkers correctly, always remember to turn their headlights on when the windshield wipers are on, etc, etc. I'm sure facial recognition is probably even at a point today where it'd be able to at least note whether I've looked in its direction. This one gets even better past a certain critical mass of robo-cars on the road all communicating with each other on some giant proximity or mesh network.

    Overall, though, we're left hopelessly speculating without knowing exactly what the two collisions were that happened while the computer was in control.

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