If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars.
However that would mean that everyone would have access to it.
The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
There are thousands of miles of roads without lane markers, shoulders, signage. Some aren't even paved. Who's going to come along and bury RFID tags or wires?
This doesn't work in climates where the road is obscured for days at a time due to snow and ice.
The tags, whatever form they may take, will designate the official lanes. But people in snowy climates don't drive in the official lines because they can't be seen. They drive an emergent set of paths where everyone else drives. It's often, if not most of the time, that these paths human drives take don't follow the actual road markings.
Traffic inductive loop counter costs a couple thousands to install. I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand.
Now imagine we're doing that 1000 times per mile, like what you're suggesting. Even if the device is free (both initial cost and maintenance) it's just too cost inhibited.
I think we shouldn't assume that the reason is some malicious intention behind "However that would mean that everyone would have access to it." It could simply be that the idea is not economical.
> I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand.
Those are installed with a massive handtruck saw while cutting off a lane of traffic all day. It takes a half dozen people working on-and-off, doing different jobs. It takes jackhammers, high pressure water from a tanker truck, and people to place and wire the sensor to power. It's way more complicated than anything you'd do at scale, because it's infrequent and the goal is to do it thoroughly with non-specialists.
If you were installing millions of tags you'd have a dry drill that could go off the back of a truck and place+fill a tag in ten minutes. If you had a line you'd have a it hanging off the back of a truck and place it continuously, like a street cleaner or edge clearer. For tags there's no reason they'd need more than one person to place and no reason to even put them in the road when they could just go on the edges. Triangulate with directional antennas or something.
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that locating the roads is by far the easiest problem for self driving. If you wanted to make a serious attempt you'd want every car to broadcast a short range location, and to share data over a mesh network. "Knowing where the road is" to precision RFID would give you has been solved for over a decade with GPS and digital maps.
Much more pressing issues are non-obvious sensing like hearing a car around a blind corner or knowing when to be cautious about moving. Knowing when something is coming onto the road or when a vehicle is having a problem. Inter-vehicle communication is just so obviously important to that... it's really frustrating how vaguely it gets talked about. I don't give a shit about teslas coordinating braking so they can form a tailgate train for efficiency, I want cars of all kinds to be warning each other about what they intend to do. I worry that legislation or at least a regulatory body will be the only way to even get people talking about it seriously.
Other than that, cameras watching for intrusion into a road would be easier than solving it from vehicles. It seems patently ridiculous putting cameras to watch every 50' section of road. 1080p+ cameras, simple detection, and mesh wifi can be built in a $30 package... but there are >2.5 million miles of paved roads in the US. 30$ per 50' would cost, bare minimum (and ignoring electricity requirements+labor+the pole to put the cameras on) 8 billion dollars.
Creating a local mesh network for cars to communicate is an idea I've had for a while. Something like an open hardware and software stack/protocol for future autonomous cars. It's an inevitable thing that must exist to realize the full potential of autonomous cars, all a question if I'd be the one to build it :).
Would be curious to know the current work in this area.
A wire in the road can't handle stuff like a pedestrian. Pedestrians normally aren't in highways but sometimes are after break-downs, accidents, construction, etc. Lane-following is close to solved on the highway, it is all that other stuff and more that is an issue. A wire could still help, but you'd still need a complex system or significantly more infrastructure than just a wire (maybe caged barriers over the lane in a way that doesn't cause issues if there is a fire, and more).
Assuming you mean dedicated self-driving lane, what about when a non-self driving car crashes into the self-driving lane? Assuming you mean to have a dedicated lane with barrier (which is already much more than a wire). And what about when a large mining truck tire rim falls off an 18-wheeler and bounces over barrier in a way that any human driver would be able to hit the brakes and be ok?
If I were to put wires in roads, it would be for wireless charging, so that autonomous taxis and delivery vehicles could keep driving forever (or at least until they require maintenance) without needing to stop to charge.
I can see this happening gradually, beginning with docking stations, followed by parking spots with wireless charges and then downtown roads and highways. With each step reducing the required amount of space destined to parking.
I don’t think it will be winner takes all. I expect competitors to be relatively close, and may not even be clear who is the winner. One brand may do better in cities, another on highways, etc.
That will affect how outsized the profits will be.
Also, because of politics, I expect there to be separate geographical winners, at least in China and not-China.
To elaborate on this, camera based lane keeping systems are readily available and generally work well if the lane markings are in good enough condition and aren't obscured by snow.
A signal embedded in the pavement wouldn't be subject to wear, but it would make adjusting lanes much more difficult (if you've driven in the bay area, you've probably noticed lane lines moved back and forth for construction pretty regularly) and it would actually be worse in the snow/ice --- a consensus lane appears which may not follow the marked alignment, and following the marked alignment would involve driving over accumulated snow and ice.
The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be the primary vector to guide the car.
Why? There's very little information that would be better coming from the road. To drive you want to know where you are, what the road surface conditions are like, where the road goes, and what else is on the road.
Road conditions can easily come from anywhere. Weather radar is at least good enough to know when roads might be wet or cold. Making roads smart enough to sense oil spills or even wetness would be incredibly hard.
Knowing where the road goes is certainly far better done by cellular. Connection to each segment of road would be fraught with hard to repair problems. Traffic conditions likewise are far better done from somewhere else, and cars would be much more able to see things on the road etc.
The only argument I can see as at all reasonable is that locating cars is difficult, and doing it with vision is incredibly challenging. You may not be aware how much GPS has improved. With a good view of the sky you can get (somewhat slow) accuracy to about a foot. Realistically that's just as good as you could possibly expect from a roadside device like RFID, bluetooth, or induction. The last inches may be important, but billions of dollars spent burying things in the road will not help.
This backfires badly in places with cold winter climates where the offical road markings and edges become obscured due to snow and ice for days and sometimes seasons (road edge creep) at a time.
Human drivers don't follow the official lane markings because they can't be seen. They follow the paths in the snow everyone else has packed down. These paths often diverge from the road markings or any sort of absolute positioning system.
However that would mean that everyone would have access to it.
The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.