Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than they thought.
About 80% of the technology needed to put self-driving cars into routine use has been developed, but the remaining 20%, including developing software that can reliably anticipate what other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists are going to do, will be much more difficult.
The technology is available now to create a car that will not hit anything. But such a car would constantly slam on the brakes.
“You see all kinds of crazy things on the road, and it turns out they’re not all that infrequent; you have to be able to handle all of them,” Argo Chief Executive Bryan Salesky said. “With radar and high-resolution cameras and all the computing power we have, we can detect and identify the objects on a street. The hard part is anticipating what they’re going to do next.”
Read the article at SFGate.
