Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
I will happily admit that visual recognition of roadways in a scenario where road markings are obscured will pose an issue. Hell, most of the time humans aren't even driving in the actual lanes when the roadways are so snow covered that the lines are not visible. Maybe cities will need to add road infrastructure that uses some form of standardized beaconing system to give the car a digital view of the road's layout. Imagine that... digital lane closures.
Where computers outshine humans is monitoring hundreds of data points at once and being able to manipulate outputs at a level far more granular than humans are capable of (or availed of in some instances).
Case in point, stability control systems. I don't care how good of a driver you are, you cannot decide to apply only the rear far-side brake caliper at 46% pressure while maintaining a steering angle of precisely 47 degrees given the surface friction of the roadway that has been calculated based off of wheel rotation via ABS sensors as well as the inputs received from the yaw sensor in the stability control system... then milliseconds later adjust the brake pressure to a different caliper entirely and steering angle to exactly the right values to mesh with new information from that plethora of sensors and resulting calculations. All the while the person behind the wheel is probably doing things counter-productive to the goal of keeping the vehicle from skidding into a guardrail.
The reason I am very confident in driverless technology being able to cope with winter driving is because we are removing the erratic, unpredictable variable behind the wheel. Sure there will be hurdles, but these systems are becoming incredibly powerful.
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This is where I am living too. Even if computers struggle with certain aspects of winter driving (no clear lane markings for example), they are still much better than humans in so many other aspects that computers will clearly be the better winter drivers very soon.