SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the do-you-remember-your-stopping-distances? dept.
Einstein once said, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
So 5-8 seconds seems like a (relatively) short amount of time. But, is it enough to safely take back control of a self-driving car and negotiate a road hazard? And if the driver is given less time, is it better or worse? Researchers at Stanford attempted to find out:
In this study, we observed how participants (N=27) in a driving simulator performed after they were subjected to an emergency loss of automation. We tested three transition time conditions, with an unstructured transition of vehicle control occurring 2 seconds, 5 seconds, or 8 seconds before the participants encountered a road hazard that required the drivers' intervention.
Few drivers in the 2 second condition were able to safely negotiate the road hazard situation, while the majority of drivers in 5 or 8 second conditions were able to navigate the hazard safely.
Although the participants in the current study were not performing secondary tasks while the car was driving, the 2 second condition appeared to be insufficient. The participants did not perform well and liked the car less. Additionally, participants' comfort in the car was also lower in the 2 second condition. Hence, it is recommended to give warnings or relinquish control more than 2 seconds in advance. While not necessarily the minimum required time, 5 second condition from a critical event appeared to be sufficient for drivers to perform the take over successfully and negotiate the problem. While the results of this study indicated that there was a minimum amount of time needed for transition of control, this was true when the drivers only monitored the car's activity and did not perform secondary tasks. It is possible that these results can change if the drivers are occupied with other activities.
Full research paper available here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:26PM
video game reflexes
You and I have video game reflexes, its the other 90% of the population I'm worried about. And multiply that by the fraction of the cars on the road having drivers who are high, drunk, or sleepy. Well, my car will drive me home, nobody will be able to tell if I have that extra beer, I can yell at the kids in the back seat for 30 seconds after all the car is driving not me...
there will still be accidents and almost all of them will be caused by human drivers
I think you misspelled software bugs. Also getting powned by viruses and miscreants and governments. Its interesting to think about swarm issues, yes genetically identical instinctual swarms usually don't collide very often, but multiple cars of various levels of dirt on cameras and completely different implementations of algos not to mention strange latency and jitter in response rates, combined with unpredictable "butterfly wing flapping" chaos road conditions (so a bird in the road in California leads domino like to a car in Florida slipping off the road in to the ocean the next day because of an unknown oil slick along the lines of the butterfly analogy in weather forecasting)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday August 10 2015, @04:16AM
"completely different implementations of algos" -- Windows Common Files in action!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.