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Peer To Peer Car Networking

Dean

I suspect that this will also bring the era of the self-driving car all the closer.

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Dan the Highway guy (mail) (www):

My first thought was 'what if there are cars sending bad data?' I would guess this is something that could be dealt with through both error correction and redundancy of data.

My second thought is that this could remove what I see as the biggest obstacle to intelligent vehicle systems: The lack of a good way to gather data in the middle range. Systems have been developed to get the data from immediately around the vehicle (sonar and radar sensors, video detection, wheel control). It's also possible to get that long range data such as congestion info from static emplacements: loop detectors, video detectors, other road sensing. But how to get the data from, say, 50' from the vehicle, in traffic? How could an individual vehicle see past 3 vehicles to identify that potential trouble? Maybe have every vehicle in between evaluating and passing data.

3.19.2007 9:41am

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Chris Lansdown (mail) (www):

Dan's right, the potential for misleading people is very large. I imagine such a system would have to be extremely closed source and rely heavily on black-box trusted computing.

Because if there's a wiff of people being able to upload their own software to such devices (and if the communication protocol isn't authenticated in ways that require the speakers themselves to come from only a few sources), the same sort of people who buy those tv-off-code-broadcasters would set up all sorts of warnings just to try to make people behave how the broadcaster wants. And I imagine every suburban neighborhood in existence (which contains at least once child) would be (reportedly) more covered in ice and oil than an ice burg which hit an oil tanker.

So I imagine that this is going to have to be very closed-source. Which is a pity.

3.19.2007 12:27pm

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Dean Esmay:

Funny, from what I've seen the best way to fix security threats like that is to open-source it. That way the problems get identified, and fixed, a lot sooner.

3.19.2007 1:16pm

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Jesse Hill (mail):

I've often wondered if Americans would be into a "self-driving car." I'm not sure they would be. Also, the first time there was a fatal accident with one of those involved I'm sure there would be an enormous lawsuit.

3.19.2007 3:13pm

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Dean Esmay:

While the first accident will undoubtedly result in a lawsuit, that's what insurance is for.

Long-term, self-driving cars will be much, much safer than human-driven cars. So it's mostly a matter of "when" and not "if." Indeed, I consider it a given that within the next few decades we'll see a move to outlaw people driving cars except in emergencies or for specialty jobs.

It's an old argument I have with Chris Lansdown. He'll undoubtedly be by soon to tell me I'm crazy again. ;-)

3.19.2007 4:55pm

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