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The racetrack is the ultimate test of driving skill, managing power, traction, and braking to produce the fastest times. Now BBC reports that engineers at Stanford University have raced their souped-up Audi TTS dubbed ‘Shelley’ on the racetrack at speeds above 120 mph. When they time tested it against David Vodden, the racetrack CEO and amateur touring class champion, the driverless race car was faster by 0.4 of a second. "We’ve been trying to develop cars that perform like the very best human drivers,” says Professor Chris Gerdes who tested Shelley at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California. “We’ve got the point of being fairly comparable to an expert driver in terms of our ability to drive around the track.”
To get the cars up to speed, the Stanford team studied drivers, even attaching electrodes to their heads to monitor brain activity in the hope of learning which neural circuits are working during difficult manoeuvres. Scientists were intrigued to find that during the most complex tasks, the experts used less brain power. They appeared to be acting on instinct and muscle memory rather than using judgement as a computer program would. Although there was previously very little difference between the path a professional driver takes around the course and the route charted by Shelley's algorithms until now the very best human drivers were still faster around the track, if just by a few seconds. Now the researchers predict that within the next 15 years, cars will drive with the skill of Michael Schumacher. What remains to be seen is how Shelly will do when running fender to fender with real human race drivers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:46AM
Situations in which a driverless car can't cope have declined and will continue to decline dramatically before their mass market use. In the meantime, humans will continue to fall asleep behind the wheel, will become cognitively "bored" during long trips, drive drunk or high, have wildly varying levels of driving ability, will continue to drive while losing vision and cognitive ability to aging, experience cardiac arrest or seizures, will be distracted by phones and passengers, and have the same comparatively poor reaction times (hundreds of milliseconds).
These systems have been driven hundreds of thousands of miles, exposed to varying real world conditions, and are being developed by many competing companies and universities. Even if eventual commercial models fail an edge case, they will save many more lives than they will destroy. Driverless cars have the reliability edge, not humans.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 24 2015, @02:17PM
So, your estimate, please: how many deaths away from the point in which driverless car get approved on public roads?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday February 24 2015, @03:01PM
Millions more.
I'm assuming you're talking about deaths due to human drivers, of course.
And the approval process will be a highly emotional, illogical political fight. Humans as a group seem incapable of higher reasoning that lets them objectively evaluate evidence, odds, and risk/rewards objectively. Witness the anti-vaxers, blind supporters of any political party, and people who keep gambling and buying lottery tickets.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:12PM
So, your estimate, please: how many deaths away from the point in which driverless car get approved on public roads?
You may want to see that approximately 1,240,000 people died on the roads last year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate [wikipedia.org]
36,000 in USA alone. It's like a 9/11 every month on the roads in the USA, but I guess that's "normal" so no one cares. Instead, everyone just engages into stupid comments how we should be driving faster, presumably because we don't kill each other fast enough? The acceptability of this as "normal" reminds me of a quote from Joker in Dark Night.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000180/quotes [imdb.com]
Joker: I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
So, people killing themselves on roads by millions, and that's OK. That's "normal" somehow. But if software would glitch and 100 people die on the roads a year because of software problems (before these edge cases can be fixed), then indeed that would no longer be acceptable??
In US, you have a 1% chance of getting killed on the roads in your life. That's more than any non-medical cause combined. You should not be worried about getting killed by guns in US, or by terrorists in Pakistan. You should be worried about getting killed on the roads in either country.
(Score: 2) by carguy on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:02PM
Lots of ways to cut these statistics. Here is another, this breaks out "non-disease" causes of death:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2012-a.gif [cdc.gov]
In USA in 2012, unintentional poisoning killed somewhat more people (across all age groups) than unintentional motor vehicle accidents.
Unintentional falls were not far behind unintentional motor vehicle. c.1970 (before non-skid bathtub mats became common) I heard that these two categories were switched -- more fatal accidents in the home than on the road (sorry no link to back that up).
Home page for this and many other similar charts:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses_images.html [cdc.gov] (.gif /.jpg formats)
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses.html [cdc.gov] (.pdf format)