Challenges of self-driving cars
Oct. 7th, 2016 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcWith the coming of self-driving cars I have been noticing my own driving and wondering how it could be emulated. There is certainly a strong element of looking ahead. For instance, this morning I was following a cyclist, there was a parked car ahead of them, and oncoming traffic several seconds out, so rather than overtake the cyclist I hung back to let them first get past between the parked car and oncoming traffic and out to clearer road before I passed them. Before that, on the dual carriageway, I could see a truck some way ahead with their turn signal indicating that they wanted to pull out onto the road, so I moved over to the outside lane and gave them a brief flash of my headlamps and out they came. Admittedly, last time I did something similar in Dundee to let a car out onto the A85, an Audi that had been behind me took the opportunity to simply speed past me on the inside.
Large trucks are often an issue: for example, coming home last night, I wanted to turn onto a road where there was a truck I thought might want to turn onto my road so I held back from the intersection to give them plenty of room to make the turn without my being in the way and indeed my guess had been correct. At that same intersection some days before there had been cars waiting to turn onto my road, and police blocking their lane, so I hung back even further to let them get around the police and out of the way; had I proceeded all the way to my stop line, it would have been rather trickier for us to all get past each other. This need for lookahead applies to other situations too: during rush-hour, traffic often backs up onto some traffic circles in Dundee and I try to enter and queue on them such that I still leave space for traffic seeking other exits to make its way past.
None of this is impossible to automate but it certainly requires looking rather further ahead at the traffic situation beyond the next stop line or one's stopping distance. Perhaps the earlier generations of self-driving cars will make me sigh at their cluelessness.
Large trucks are often an issue: for example, coming home last night, I wanted to turn onto a road where there was a truck I thought might want to turn onto my road so I held back from the intersection to give them plenty of room to make the turn without my being in the way and indeed my guess had been correct. At that same intersection some days before there had been cars waiting to turn onto my road, and police blocking their lane, so I hung back even further to let them get around the police and out of the way; had I proceeded all the way to my stop line, it would have been rather trickier for us to all get past each other. This need for lookahead applies to other situations too: during rush-hour, traffic often backs up onto some traffic circles in Dundee and I try to enter and queue on them such that I still leave space for traffic seeking other exits to make its way past.
None of this is impossible to automate but it certainly requires looking rather further ahead at the traffic situation beyond the next stop line or one's stopping distance. Perhaps the earlier generations of self-driving cars will make me sigh at their cluelessness.
