This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90's!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY
You could imagine we'd be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.
probably knew long ago, just strung em out for funding
Anyone knowledgeable about city planning? Why did we never put some type of signal in our roads? (I don't know. Passive RFID every few feet?) It would only cost what, ten, twenty thousand on top of each million spent paving every mile?
Seems it would be better baseline navigation than self driving cars and occasionally map apps. The cars would still have to do obstacle avoidance, of course.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about self driving tech or city planning. But if interstates are replaced every 10 years, and highways every 20, and Musk first made these claims in 2013? Then we'd have the base tech for every auto manufacturer to do moderately reliable self driving on interstates and a lot of our highways already.
Or maybe that large view pathfinding is the relatively easy part? That's why I'm asking. I'm sure there's something more obvious from an informed viewpoint that I don't know.
I imagine power is the tricky part. Badge readers and the like that use RFID also use wireless electricity to "power" the card. The range of that is limited without massive coils. You may be able to harness power from heat in asphalt (from traffic or sunlight beating on it), but I'd think that'd also be very limiting.
Better would be low power RF beacons set up at every transformer or every N utility poles. Something like BLE, maybe a little bit beefier. Power is readily available. They don't require data. All they need to do is broadcast their exact location and time (which they can get from GPS receivers).
It is way more experience. Has to withstand great pressure and sheer forces. Updates as road changes. Heat of building asphalt and later of summer. Horrible road maintenance. And what does it provide exactly to a car that actually helps? How long until most roads are updated with it?
Y'know GPS didn't even enter my mind. Hell, depending on GPS 3 accuracy (isn't it supposed to be in the centimeters?) my talk of signals is completely moot. That measured against a map of roads on a server somewhere would probably let you download an entire map of nodes toward your destination. Along the way the car just measures against its current location and does the math for obstacles. Great point. This is why I ponder shit out loud. Thanks.
But Tesla will gladly keep charging a lot of money for FSD.
No, there won't be endless series of recalls and free upgrades for everyone until they finally achieve it as promised, somewhere between 2050 and 3050...
You have to live with it as it is.
Forever? No. Only for as long as you live.
