[andrewray]

Cars seem fundamentally different than his other examples: Spacecraft, underwater vehicles, and airplanes. The importance difference is cars have a clear, visual grid of where they can travel and where they cannot travel. Painted lines on the road and navigational signs provide a construct of the environment around them.

Maybe the closest comparison is subway / metro rails. There are already many fully automated subway systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

[zhanwei]

There are still some elements of uncertainty in car driving. For e.g. driverless cars are confused by cyclist doing track stand[1]. Hopefully with enough data driverless car could overcome these difficulties.

[1] http://road.cc/content/news/162468-cyclist-doing-trackstand-...

[icc97]

Interesting story. There's a later article [1] that describes the problems that the Google car has with assertiveness at junctions.

[1]: http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/a_cyclists_encounter_w...

[snowwrestler]

The hard part of self-driving cars is not staying within the painted lines of the road, the hard part is avoiding other valuable things like cars, trucks, bikes, people, wildlife, etc. There is no reliable visual grid for those things.

Subways handle this problem by being given dedicated underground tunnels which exclude all those things. And even subways hit people sometimes when they fall onto the tracks.

[rdtsc]

> difference is cars have a clear, visual grid of where they can travel and where they cannot travel.

Visual grid for people to look at. All those cues and signs were not designed to be read and processed by robots. And there are crazy pedestrians, crazy drivers, maybe cattle crossing the street, an accident, ice, fog, ice and fog and cattle, unpaved roads, etc.

I would think an airplane's environment when in the air seems more predictable and stable, than an environment for car on the streets. Same thing for underwater vehicles. There might be crazy pranksters playing games with the vehicle 100 feet under water, but probably not a high probability.

[IanCal]

> And there are crazy pedestrians, crazy drivers, maybe cattle crossing the street, an accident, ice, fog, ice and fog and cattle, unpaved roads, etc.

All of which people often don't do that well on themselves.

> All those cues and signs were not designed to be read and processed by robots

No, but they were designed to be clear and quickly identifiable by humans with vague glances. We're not asking for them to identify a subtly sarcastic remark, signs are more of the "BIG RED CIRCLE WITH STRAIGHT WHITE LINE" variety.

> I would think an airplane's environment when in the air seems more predictable and stable, than an environment for car on the streets

Possibly, but the risks are significantly higher. If something unexpected happens you can't just come to a halt and put your warning lights on 30,000 feet in the air.

> Same thing for underwater vehicles

I disagree on this one, the environment is going to be largely unknown and more importantly for exploration you aren't just saying "go here". When I drive somewhere, many of the roads will have been driven over thousands of times the same day.

[Tideflat]

In Northern climes, the painted lines on the road are often covered by snow.