The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces.- What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision.
- What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that kind of thing when learning to drive) earlier. What are the limitations of the peripheral vision of the car when checking hazards?
- What if a fire hydrant bursts on the side of the road 50m in front of the car and makes the road ahead really wet? Can the cameras determine and detect quickly enough the need for different driving (and probably braking) due to a change in surface?The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.