One thing I have always failed to understand about self-driving tech -- what's the motivation for each car to do its own self-driving computation in busy metropolitan areas?
Are there technologies that integrate with some kind of existing infrastructure like beacons, etc. that would just tell the car where the streets are? If not, why not?
Smart roads have been attempted for years. Usually with some sort of antenna or wireless/light transmitter embedded in the road itself. The cost per mile was just too high. Far simpler to use what's already there with computer vision and map metadata. Now that cars have GPS, A-GPS, and RTK need to tailor roads for autonomous vehicles has been diminished.
That's why I specified "in large metropolitan areas". I can see that it's impractical to outfit anything outside dense cities with such beacons, but inside the city they could augment, if not replace autonomous driving systems. Or so I imagine.
> GPS, A-GPS, and RTK
Thanks for telling me about RTK, I did not know about this!
It's cheaper to buy a self-driving car than to augment every road the customer might want to drive on.
Maybe if we were immediately jumping to 50% self-driving adoption it would be easier to make smart roads, but that's not the world we're living in yet.
In addition to the other replies, is path finding even enough? I think a lot of the hard part is dealing with arbitrary obstacles in the road which won't be playing nice with the centralized system.
> GPS is already beacon infrastructure that tells cars where they are on the streets :)
Yeah, but it doesn't say where the streets are, or where the traffic lights are, or (officially) what's the speed limit on this stretch of road, etc. All those are via the layer that's applied by a private company, and may differ substantially from how the city itself intends to direct traffic.
You are right, GPS alone doesn't. But it's augmented with both specialised maps (from the private companies you mentioned) and sensor data. Some self-driving cars use detailed 3D maps containing information about e.g. traffic light positions and have technology to read road signs and lights. Just like human drivers do.
I used to work for TomTom and at the time they were just getting into the self-driving cars sector. I don't know where they are with it now, but four years ago they were already building high-definition 3D maps for autonomous cars. And they had road sign reading technology.
You can see their HD 3D map in a video [1] where they also explain how it's constructed using their mapping vehicles.
EDIT: To make my point clear, we don't really need to invest in smart roads - the cars and the supporting tech are already smart enough.
>what's the motivation for each car to do its own self-driving computation in busy metropolitan areas?
There are a few reasons I can think of. 1) latency - the same argument against data center approach 2) security - we can't trust other computers as once a hardware is owned by somewhere the security battle is lost 3) unnecessary and insufficient - there are human drivers and there are cases when there is no other self-driving car around.
Are there technologies that integrate with some kind of existing infrastructure like beacons, etc. that would just tell the car where the streets are? If not, why not?