It might begin very soon

rlw999 wrote:

Groover wrote:

ksss wrote:
I would be curious how automation would deal with icy roads and heavy snow fall when the edges of the road cant be identified or sensors packed with snow and ice. I am sure they have a solution for this, but at times when you cant see the road and gps may not have road exactly laid out the way that it physically is, not sure how they automate that.

How should a human respond? Program in that response.
A self driving truck may have an option that a human doesn't: Stop and wait it out. After all the computer isn't going to freeze to death while it waits.

And they have another option similar to what many humans do when the road is snowed over -- wait for a snowplow, then form a train behind it, each driverless vehicle watching the one in front of it to figure out where the lane is. If one vehicle gets into trouble (runs off the road, gets stuck on a patch of ice, whatever), it can tell everyone behind it to stop.

Tesla autopilot already does some of this -- it tracks the car in front to help with lanekeeping, but I don't know if it does that on snowy roads where there are no lane lines visible at all.

I am not sure where the opportunity is to stop a tractor trailer on mountain roads in the West in a white out. Stop right in the roadway rising up to mountain pass? White out conditions would make for interesting computer generated decisions. I don't think a computers decisions would be the same as a human driver would make. Not that humans always make the right decisions either in similar conditions, but auto drive in those conditions may make worse decisions. I am not against the concept, I would just like to know or see how these trucks manage other than normal driving conditions.