Got to witness some level 5 autonomous car engineering today on a local network -- watching the data points being created across any number of artificially created accident constructs that an autonomous vehicle will need to be aware of.

It amazes me how fast processing power is today, and how "intelligent" these digital operators can be in analyzing 100 disparate objects within range, including their speed, position, any acceleration, expected position vectors, etc. And it has to re-analyze this data in real time as the vehicle changes position as well as the 100 other objects.

Plus it's reading speed limit signs, checking all of the various traffic signals, looking in car windows to see if a door may open into the street, etc.

This system also tries to spot traffic lights on cross streets to make assumptions for how fast it should slow down for a current red light, as well as noticing if there might be any debris on the street or potholes that it needs to avoid.

As much as the news media says that Americans won't give up control of their cars, and that the average driving consumer fears automation, if you haven't taken a ride in a level 2 or level 3 autonomous car yet, you have no place to debate. Level 4 is even more amazing and game changing, but the fully autonomous systems already in testing today are mind blowing.

The amount of valuable time wasted driving -- along with the accidents, deaths and inefficiencies of human inability to correct for traffic congestion or pattern/flow -- will be returned to us as time we can spend doing something we actually care about.
And it isn't even 5 years away anymore. The system I witnessed today is no more than 2 vehicle years away from production. 2019 if not sooner, assuming governments don't block progress.

Gordon wrote on Jun 19^th, 2017 at 10:41pm:



I had never considered that ...