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Posted by: Scorch676
Posted by: A Good Troll
Western world is too broke to upgrade infrastructure to make this happen.
You wouldn't have to upgrade any infrastructure, the Google cars have already driven crazy distances on public roads and they haven't had any problems with current roads.
You can't just stick it on any road and drive it.
Reference
Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, it relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.
The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. When it's the autonomous vehicle's turn to drive itself, it compares the data it is acquiring to the previously recorded data, an approach that is useful to differentiate pedestrians from stationary objects like poles and mailboxes.
You have to log each and every mile of America's millions of miles of road and all the locations around it. Parking lots, everything. Nevermind any new construction as it is built.
Good luck.
Toyota's relies on sporadic placement of markers to give it a reference point - to use their approach, you'd have to put those markers along all those millions of miles of road.
[Edited on 01.04.2013 12:41 PM PST]