incremental features already made available to consumers, including cars that can parallel park by themselves and systems that alert drivers when the vehicle is about to drift into another lane.
But we’re at least a decade away from cars that are capable of driving completely solo, says Jones, the computer-vision research scientist who has worked at MERL for about 15 years.
“I think we can get 95 percent of the way there, but the last 5 percent is really difficult,” Jones says. “You almost have to solve all of A.I. to have a car that drives with no driver.”
For example, creating software that can understand and predict the behavior of other human drivers is a huge challenge, and one that is outside the scope of MERL’s research, Waters says.
Jones gives a hypothetical scenario in which a driverless car is perched behind a stop sign, trying to turn left onto a busy road that rarely has breaks in traffic. A human driver would do a sort of “social dance” where he or she inches forward, making eye contact with oncoming drivers and trying to find a safe enough opening to make the turn, he says. It would be hard to write software to handle that situation. “Really it’s reading the other drivers,” Jones says. “That kind of thing, I think, is very difficult to get a car to do safely.”
Another problem that must be solved, Waters says, is “how the car decides when it needs to stop being the autopilot—when it’s getting out of its depth. And how it notifies you fast enough and you take control fast enough to really be safe.”
Although things are moving fast in driverless car research, the field is still early and filled with hype. “We’re going to pass through valleys before we make it to the promised land,” Waters says.
