If you've ever wondered how a self-driving car might handle bad weather,Scarlett Fay Archives inconsistent traffic signals and unpredictable human drivers, you may have your answer.
Drive.ai, the self-driving car startup that adds autonomous car-to-human communication through visual cues, just took one of its retrofitted self-driving cars on the kind of road trip that can prove particularly challenging for people andautonomous vehicles.
SEE ALSO: Alphabet's Waymo unveils its autonomous Chrysler minivanOn Tuesday, Drive.Ai released an unusual, narration-less and, mostly, text-free (it only says, "This is a fully autonomous drive") video of a standard car retrofitted with the Drive.Ai self-driving system tooling around the streets of Mountain View, California.
Self-driving cars in that part of the U.S. are not unusual, but as the car drives, the sun sets and the rain starts. Soon it's pouring and visibility of street signs and, especially, lane markings all but disappear. If you've driven in the rain, you recognize this as the moment when you grip the steering wheel tighter and wonder if you're still in your lane or the one next to you.
Then things get even dicier.
At about a minute in, the Drive.AI car pulls up to a four way stop. There's another car in the right lane and, even though the self-driving car has the right of way, the human-driven car cuts it off. The Drive.AI car appears to handle the situation smoothly. In fact, throughout the somewhat stressful drive that also included a broken traffic light, the human passenger, who is seated in the driver's seat, never appears to reach for the steering wheel.
Drive.AI CEO Sameep Tandon released a statement with the video:
Today we released the first public video of self-driving technology from the Drive.ai team. In the video, you will see our system navigate the streets of Mountain View, CA not only in daylight, but also in the rain and at night. These are conditions drivers encounter every single day. Any successful self-driving technology will need to address countless unpredictable situations and a wide range of driving conditions, yet few are able to today.
It's a pretty impressive autonomous display, but Drive.AI is by no means alone in tackling adverse driving conditions.
Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, has been working on driving in rain for years and even put windshield wipers on their car's sensor domes to maintain visibility. The cars will also drive more cautiously in the rain. However, according to a Waymo Medium post discussing the limitations of self-driving technology, "For now, if it’s particularly stormy, our cars automatically pull over and wait until conditions improve."
Since we weren't in the Drive.AI car, we can't tell if the conditions were bad enough for a different self-driving car technology to force the human driver to take over or to pull over and wait out the rain.
Still, as Waymo continues collecting adverse driving condition data, Drive.AI is putting cars on the road today and letting them drive in conditions that might challenge many human drivers.
[Update 2-16-2017 3:11 PM ET: Waymo contacted us shortly after we published this story to let Mashableknow that it is testing self-driving cars in adverse conditions -- including moving some testing to Kirkland, Washington, where there is more rain. We've asked them for me details and video of their results.]
Topics Self-Driving Cars
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