I think for those of us in the snow belt this could potentially be great news. I first became aware of ground penetrating radar when I worked with remote sensing in Michigan where clouds often obscured satellite photos of farm fields. The military had the capability to look through the clouds but unfortunately the technology never became inexpensive enough for agricultural use.
People may not realize that when it snows the landscape dramatically changes for the sensors on the Google cars and they can't follow the map and suddenly they're quite literally lost.
What do you do when you can't see the lines on the road? Or when cars are suddenly four abreast on a three lane highway? Or things like the especially treacherous black ice. So I am encouraged that it may be possible for us in the great white North to use our self driving cars year round.
> The military had the capability to look through the clouds but unfortunately the technology never became inexpensive enough for agricultural use.
How do the economics of this work out? It seems strange that anyone can afford to spend tens of millions on a satellite launch, but can't afford to put fancier equipment on the satellite. Maybe the penetrating radar apparatus is much heavier and so more costly to launch?
> Maybe the penetrating radar apparatus is much heavier and so more costly to launch?
Radar is power intensive. As a commercial operator, you this weigh launch cost, recharge time, and resolution. I've seen implementations where an hour of charge bursts to minutes of capture.
> What do you do when you can't see the lines on the road? Or when cars are suddenly four abreast on a three lane highway? Or things like the especially treacherous black ice.
Indeed, these things are also quite tricky for human drivers (Winter is a windfall for body shops!).
People may not realize that when it snows the landscape dramatically changes for the sensors on the Google cars and they can't follow the map and suddenly they're quite literally lost.
What do you do when you can't see the lines on the road? Or when cars are suddenly four abreast on a three lane highway? Or things like the especially treacherous black ice. So I am encouraged that it may be possible for us in the great white North to use our self driving cars year round.