Unmanned vehicles teach driving skills in Grand Theft Auto V

On Geektimes there is a lot of information about auto pilots for cars, robots and other related topics. Despite the fact that a large number of companies are engaged in the development of new systems, according to experts, there are still 5 or even 10 years before the mass appearance of rob-mobiles on the roads, no matter who developed the current form of artificial intelligence, is just a neural network, with these or other possibilities.

The problem is not only that the autonomous control systems are relatively simple, but also that the developers do not have enough time to train the autopilot. It should be “trained” with real examples, and not just test polygons. But in order to get more or less satisfactory results, thousands and thousands of kilometers are needed. Driving on public roads, ro-mobili can receive information about various non-standard situations, literally facing hourly problems.

So far, the best results show Google mobiles, having traveled hundreds of thousands or even millions of kilometers along various roads. In the same Uber, for example, the situation is much worse . And there is not much time to run around the system - after all, competitors can go ahead (and go out). What to do? Probably, the exit can be virtual reality, including games.
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Developers should hurry if they want to be first. And Nio can help speed up the process of creating real robots. This is another startup that develops electric vehicles with autonomous control system. According to CEO David Bachchet, the new technologies offered by Nio will help bring fully autonomous vehicles onto public roads by 2020. What technology is planned to use? Simulation in virtual reality. “To depend on the data received by cars on the roads is not practical,” says Baccet. He says that the weak form of AI that drives a car needs to be trained in games.


Namely - the games that are as close to reality as possible in terms of roads and the situation on them. According to some experts, such a game could be Grand Theft Auto V. Of course, in order to immerse AI in such a game, special algorithms are needed. Their development is now being done by representatives of both Nio and some other companies.

In the last part of the game about bandits and cars from Rockstar - 262 types of various vehicles, 1000 models of pedestrians and animals found on the road, 14 types of weather conditions and a huge number of types of roads, highways, bridges, tunnels and signal systems.

The idea is not only that the roads of the virtual city of Los Santos can replace AI with a ride on real asphalt. A big plus can be called the fact that the conditions of the virtual environment can be changed, but in a normal situation it is hardly possible to simulate a particular situation on the road. “This is the richest virtual environment from which we can extract data,” said Alan Kornchhauser, Professor Princeton, who with his team is developing smart cars with autonomous control systems.

In virtual reality, you can easily drive a couple of million kilometers a day, emulating thousands of traffic accidents and situations. For example, the simultaneous rebuilding of three neighboring cars on the highway.

When testing a robotic car on an ordinary road, a number of situations that are possible in principle may never occur. As a result, the AI ​​will not receive the necessary information and may get into trouble if such a situation happens in the future. But in virtual reality, you can simulate anything in any quantity.

Now, the Waymo project is looking at virtual reality with interest. “We can reproduce the exact situation and predict with the help of a simulation what can happen if the car is on the road in an autonomous driving mode,” the company representatives said.



Despite all the successes of the robots (and there are still a lot of them), a person still responds to various situations on the roads much faster. It is a person who can solve an unforeseen situation in a couple of seconds, despite the fact that such a situation has met for a particular motorist for the first time.

By the way, even when the AI ​​will be ready to enter the roads, another problem appears - the rules of the road and certification of romo-mobiles. In the US, various states regulate the operation of automatic systems on the roads in different ways. Somewhere they are allowed on roads of a certain type, but somewhere are prohibited at all. Now large companies, which are engaged in the development of rob-mobiles, gradually change the situation in their favor. So by 2020, when, in the opinion of many, cars driven by AI, will come out on the roads, perhaps their ride no one and nothing will interfere.