Comment by fragmede
13 hours ago
What's hilarious to me is that this scenario is framed as such an impossibly difficult thing for self-driving technology to accomplish. Detecting a car in front of you, and maneuvering left or right is doable without even using advanced models, nevermind the fact that we have them now. The other supposedly impossible feat is for the self-driving car to create a lane when there's been so much snow that the lines and thus lanes aren't visible. Given high quality sensor data, does it really seem that impossibly hard for the computer, which is already competently driving on the road in practice, in SF and Phoenix and LA; it seems impossibly hard for that computer to take the full width of the remaining road, divide in two, assuming it's a bidirectional road, and then create as much lanes + safety margin as can (safely) exist, and then pick one? Proof is in the pudding and all, so here's a 4 year old video showing that comma.ai's capable of that, in the sunny winter but snowy road condition in that video.
No cars to follow. No lane markings. Just a sheet of white with ditches on both side. Worse yet, no prior practice. Where you know the lanes are means little when the other cars are not respecting them. (As if lanes matter as nobody wants to drive that close together.) It isnt impossible but certainly a far more difficult problem than navigating an LA suburb.