[jfim]

Those are two pretty different domains. In manufacturing automation, some of the things that are hard include gripping objects, handling fluids and pastes, and adapting to design changes.

For self driving cars, the controls are pretty similar, even across car models. Gas, brakes, and steering. It doesn't happen that a supplier ran out of engines and a decision is made to replace the car's propulsion by jet engines, thrust vectoring, or a hovercraft. It doesn't matter too much for self driving cars to be within 0.1 inches of the center of the road, but if your electrical components are offset by 0.1 inches or there's 0.1 fluid ounces too much glue because this batch of glue is more liquid than the previous one, the electronics probably won't work in the end.

[Dahoon]

And yet if you look at what actual experts, that aren't trying to sell anything are saying, like automotive testing bodies (EuroNCAP, ADAC, FIA, etc) the consensus is that self-driving cars are at least 15 years away. The gap between reality and what salesmen have sold to common people is gigantic.

[raducu]

Also the R&D budget for self-driving cars is bottomless.

There's a limit to the R&D budget for assembling THIS year's iphone, above which it's just better to use humans.

[haltingproblem]

Apple manufacturing budget >> Self driving car r&d budget.

[haltingproblem]

My comment was not about robotics but about detecting when things had gone wrong. Again, the manufacturing lines are in a very controlled environment - loaded with sensors, compute power, perfect lighting, humidity etc. Compare that to the noisy world of roads, traffic, weather and humans.