People get overconfident with self-driving cars because they consider the problem as navigating from A to B while driving along the road within the law. That's the easy par The hard part is the long tail of human behaviour and the unexpected you have to deal with.
Just consider an object on the road. Is it roadkill? Trash? Will it get out of the way? Is it a person under a blanket? In some places it may well be a person to get you to stop so they can rob you or worse.
It's said that humans are motivated by fear and greed when it comes down to it. Let's talk about fear.
A lot of what keeps people inline is implicitly or explicitly fear of what people might do. They're an unknown. It's why a burglar may not care about an alarm but a dog is a deterrent. Will that dog bite? Fear of those unknowns makes the burglar look for easier prey. Not always but statistically often. It's one reason why people get dogs.
It's the whole basis for having doormen and the like in buildings over automated systems. That doorman is a much bigger unknown and can react in ways machines can't.
It's the same on the road. There's only so rude or inconsiderate many drivers will be because they fear the consequences of road rage and such.
So what happens when such a driver sees a car that is self-driving? It is absolutely naive to assume that drive won't change their behaviour.
When flying through a forest, you're basically just dodging trees. Wildlife will tend to avoid you. Just identifying larger wildlife and steering clear of them is likely sufficient. Driving is just much more difficult.
I'd say self-driving cars in the sense where the car isn't even designed to have a human driver anymore is at least 20+ years away (and, much like AGI, probably will remain that way for some time).
Instead you'll have what we already have to some degree: driver assistance for the simpler parts of driving like staying in a lane on a highway and avoiding hitting the car in front of you. That's the easy part. Over time, more and more of those features will be automated. But it's still going to be a giant leap to autonomous driving.
Almost static scene.
Drones are also not trying to avoid each others, I'd be curious to see them trying to fly as a dense flock in the forest, or at human height in a crowd.
These drones need to be able to do one thing:
- do not hit the tree (or ground)
And the things not to not hit are basically static. Year, Wind might move parts of them here and there, but you can just try to make sure to avoid them far enough. And we do not see if they can do event that.
Self driving cars on the other hand...
- avoid static objects (like trees, or houses)
- stay in lane
- detect and act on traffic signs and lights
- detect other moving object and predict where they will be in the near future
- watch for suddenly appearing lifeforms all around you, do not hit them!
- if you leave your lane, do so orderly
- do all that at speeds far over 40km/h
I think the "static objects" parts is not the hardest part on that list.RADAR/LIDAR are good at that. I imagine the "everything and everyone is moving in random directions" part makes things harder.
Maybe this approach will help, as suggested in the article:
The applications are not limited to quadrotors. The researchers explain that the same approach could be useful for improving the performance of autonomous cars ...
the drones are doing 3D from stereo. My understanding those autonomous cars we see around SV don't do it (except for some Ford sedans - probably Ford venture - who have what looks like stereo for the front view). Google and some others build 3D from lidar - it is almost as good as stereo though much less resolution. The low lidar resolution is close to being good enough for the street driving while it wouldn't work for the forest at meaningful speeds (even if somebody managed to place a lidar on drone)
