Title pretty much asks the question. Inspired by the Intel commercial where the guy gets a facefull of doughnut when his self-driving car hits a bump.
But what if he was tooling down the road at 60 and hits a “wheel-breaker”? Plenty of these around where I drive. Would the car detect it and avoid? How about a 2x4, or even plywood with nails sticking out of it?
How good is this tech? Can the car see a big hole in the road upcoming?
Just saw it again. Interesting. The car is a BMW, and in teeny tiny print, it says “BMW self-driving cars are not available”.
Double :rolleyes:
I know that if I sit up higher in my seat I can see potholes easier. A pothole camera would need to be mounted as high as possible to evaluate pothole depth.
After having shown that they can work in California, everyone is opening research centers in Detroit. So don’t worry, they’ll have plenty of potholes as test material.
It couldnt be a camera, not of the optic kind.
Potholes can fill with water, can be hidden in dark by shadow, and lots of other things.
Seems you would need something else thats probably hella expensive.
Some kind of radar or laser scanning setup or something?
I feel like being able to sense and respond to unexpected road hazards would be a fundamental capability of self driving cars. Responding to unexpected hazards is a big part of successful driving for people, after all.
Detroit huh. I can’t wait to see how they fare when its 20 below, ice covered roads and whiteout/billizard conditions. Pot holes will be the least of your worries, with or without Lidar. Might as well stick a white cane out of your car window.
Human drivers only rely on visuals - with self-driving cars, visual input will only be a one element, combined with GPS, road data collected from other cars, positional data streams coming from other cars, weather data, LIDAR, etc.
Referring to the road conditions of MI using words like “pothole” is misleading. “Sinkhole” or “death trap” might be more appropriate. 
The issue with self-driving cars isn’t going to be the self-driving cars, it will be with the legacy human-driven cars.
I agree, even with the best computing a computer will not be able to predict certain actions of human drivers, or rule any out. Mostly one-side but I can see how there are pros and cons of both.
There are already normal cars that do this, Mercedes comes to mind. They scan with radar (?) and basically lift the wheel so it floats at road height while traversing the pothole. Only in the “active suspension” models, so not very cheap.
Dennis
I would expect something like this, just with an IR laser instead of visible.
One of the issues of having lived in areas where it snows is that your vehicle is filthy the moment you leave the car wash. How do self-driving car sensors work covered in layers of ice, snow, mud and dirt (in many cases all at once!)?
IME most human drivers are terrible at noticing all but the biggest potholes. Potholes filled with muddy rainwater? Fuggedaboutit.
However we also get a feel for the overall quality of a given road, and are on the lookout for potholes when driving on shitty roads.
I don’t see any particular technical difficulty in implementing this behaviour in a self-driving car. So they should at least match humans’ ability in this regard.
Yep. My wife hit a pothole on the highway two days ago- broad daylight, plenty of visibility, she just didn’t see it in time- and had a tire blow out as a result.
I always think it interesting that people think the engineers who are developing self driving cars are designing cars that will only work in ideal laboratory conditions.
Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
Business Insider as an article about six problems self-driving cars still have, and avoiding potholes is one of them, and a Newsy article talks about self-driving cars refusing to avoid potholes if it involves changing lanes, because apparently they would rather take greater chance of doing damage to the self-driving car than the lesser chance of hitting another car(it’s a safety feature).
Another thing that will be happening is that the vehicles will be part of a larger mesh network where they will be in constant communication about road conditions to know to allow for the broken down car ahead or the emergency vehicle coming up from behind or just the general traffic congestion and road construction. There’s no reason not to share that there’s a pothole at 32.783717, -96.753956 with all the other info flying around.
That is if companies with self-driving cars are willing to let their cars talk to sd cars from other companies, and I can see where there might be some reluctance, especially if part of what you are advertising is that your car is safer and more reliant the sd car from another company.
Also, there is still the problem of relaying information road condition information in the city, where tall building block the signal from the car to the satellite.