Are today’s challenges of making robocars dealbreakers? short answer: no

Maps are too important, and too costly

Google’s car, and others, rely on a clever technique that revolutionized the DARPA challenges. Each road is driven manually a few times, and the scans are then processed to build a super-detailed “ultramap” of all the static features of the road. This is a big win because big server computers get to process the scans in as much time as they need, and see everything from different angles. Then humans can review and correct the maps and they can be tested. That’s hard to beat, and you will always drive better if you have such a map than if you don’t.

Any car that could drive without a map would effectively be a car that’s able to make an adequate map automatically. As things get closer to that, making maps will become cheaper and cheaper.

Naturally, if the road differs from the map, due to construction or other changes, the vehicle has to notice this. That turns out to be fairly easy. Harder is assuring it can drive safely in this situation. That’s still a much easier problem than being able to drive safely everywhere without a map, and in the worst case, the problem of the changed road can be “solved” by just the ability to come to a safe stop. You don’t want to do that super often, but it remains the fail-safe out. If there is a human in the car, they can guide the vehicle in this. Even if the vehicle can’t figure out where to go to be safe, the human can. Even a remote human able to look at transmitted pictures can help the car with that — not live steering, but strategic guidance.

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