Anyone knowledgeable about city planning? Why did we never put some type of signal in our roads? (I don’t know. Passive RFID every few feet?) It would only cost what, ten, twenty thousand on top of each million spent paving every mile?
Seems it would be better baseline navigation than self driving cars and occasionally map apps. The cars would still have to do obstacle avoidance, of course.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about self driving tech or city planning. But if interstates are replaced every 10 years, and highways every 20, and Musk first made these claims in 2013? Then we’d have the base tech for every auto manufacturer to do moderately reliable self driving on interstates and a lot of our highways already.
Or maybe that large view pathfinding is the relatively easy part? That’s why I’m asking. I’m sure there’s something more obvious from an informed viewpoint that I don’t know.
Y’know GPS didn’t even enter my mind. Hell, depending on GPS 3 accuracy (isn’t it supposed to be in the centimeters?) my talk of signals is completely moot. That measured against a map of roads on a server somewhere would probably let you download an entire map of nodes toward your destination. Along the way the car just measures against its current location and does the math for obstacles. Great point. This is why I ponder shit out loud. Thanks.