Robot Cars Can Learn to Drive without Leaving the Garage
January 17th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review:
The computers that control self-driving cars are gaining valuable knowledge about the real world in some surprising ways—including browsing online maps and playing video games.
Researchers at Princeton University recently developed a computer vision and mapping system that gathered useful information about the physical properties of roads by studying Google Street View and comparing the scenes to the information provided in open-source mapping data. This allowed it to, for example, learn where the edges of an intersection should be based on images captured by Google’s mapping cars.
In separate work revealed Wednesday, researchers at OpenAI, a nonprofit focused on fundamental AI research, created a way to have software agents learn driving strategy by experimenting in the video game Grand Theft Auto V, through a platform known as Universe. Some video games are now so visually realistic that they can let a computer vision learn about the real world.
