Someday, watching videos of cars driving themselves will become boring and commonplace. But we’re not there yet. This video, shared by s...
Someday, watching videos of cars driving themselves will become boring and commonplace. But we’re not there yet. This video, shared by self-driving startup Drive.ai, shows the company’s technology at work on a rainy evening in Mountain View, California, near Drive.ai’s headquarters.
This video is particularly interesting as it’s one of the few that we’ve seen show a car driving in poor weather. Last year, Ford showed off its cars driving in snow in a closed, controlled environment, but this is one of the first times we’ve seen cars driving in the rain out in the real world.
As Drive.ai notes in a blog post about the video, rain and night driving are conditions that drivers could experience every day. “Any successful self-driving technology will need to address countless unpredictable situations and a wide range of driving conditions,” the post says. “Yet few are able to today.”
RAIN IS SOMETHING ALL SELF-DRIVING SYSTEMS WILL NEED TO DEAL WITH
Drive.ai uses “deep learning” technology to program its artificial intelligence system. Rather than programming a car so that it knows exactly what to do, Drive.ai hopes to allow its driving AI to learn on its own. That means, like a human, the more time it spends driving and the more scenarios it encounters, the better it'll get at responding to them.
A Drive.ai spokesperson told The Verge that the video is “uncut and uninterrupted, just stabilized and sped up a bit,” and noted these other highlights:
Some highlights about the video:
- Fully autonomous driving during the entire video. No human intervention.
- Starting from 0:10 heavy downpour.
- 0:30 Narrow street with parked cars and glare from oncoming traffic.
- 1:00 Busy 4-way stop sign and a car (possibly illegally) cutting in front of the Drive.ai car.
- 1:50 Broken red light at intersection
- 2:35 Night driving with confusing reflections from the wet ground
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