If people would keep their cats indoors and their dogs on a leash, it wouldn’t be a problem.
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Because driver-less cars are the real victims here. 
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Yeah, a tracker like this would be the trigger to me spray painting over all the optical sensors of self driving cars I encounter.
I imagine in the real world; human drivers are barely better than the models. I assume the models will get better; I can’t believe that it will be intractable for long.
Why not just leap now to using something like this as an additional safety? Just build it into all new cars. We know that the collisions with cyclists are already pretty dangerous to riders. Assisted breaking, and blind spot alerts that detect cyclists would be a good thing for safety. Human drivers are probably as good as they’re going to get, let’s do better.
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Far out. Why can’t we just have beacons on cars and bikes? Honda motorbikes have been working on this.
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Can’t we just teach the self-driving cars to look for red/orange triangles?
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Or something.
When that’s true and they can show that with reasonable confidence.
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I was taking my son to hockey practice around 5:30am this morning. As we drove though downtown Vancouver on a one-way street, a low shape meandered towards us in the dark. It was a homeless guy in a wheelchair. So I wonder, will he get a transponder too?
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In the case of RFID chips it’s an inverse-4th law.
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Self driving motorcycles will be first to hit the streets…
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It’s a question of who you mandate bears the burden of a new tech. I, as a cyclist shouldn’t have to wear a special transponder so that someone else can have their fun little tech toy. How about we mandate that the companies making autonomous cars create something fit for purpose on public streets rather than requiring everyone else to adapt for them?
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Email is not a real-time problem.
If reliable spam detection adds a 10 second delay to all email handling, it’s 100% just fine.
If reliable bicyclist detection adds a 1 second delay to all steering and brake handling, it’s 0% just fine.
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This is why we’ll need self-riding bicycles.
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Detecting bicycles is not a huge problem. Pushing self-driving car technology out onto the road when it’s clearly unfinished is a huge problem. Meatspace is no place for beta testing.
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I’m saying not even considering the self-driving cars, bicycle/motorcycle safety can be made better by improving their visibility to all drivers. Transponders can be an additional safety feature that could make car drivers more aware of smaller vehicles. There’s no reason this has to be for the sole benefit of self-driving cars, this could be helpful for everyone.
Also, if the device is very cheap, easy to obtain, and not identifiable to a person, then is it really that big of an ask? It’s no different than mandating flashing lights on bikes at night, or helmets.
It could be simple as a 433mhz low power beacon emitting a random id code. You could reset the code after movement has stopped. A good battery, and it could probably last more than a year. Maybe have it blink or chirp when it gets old. Your talking about less than a dollar in electronic parts.
Edit: its also possible to power it off vibration/movement.
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IFF transponders!!
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As a bicyclist this is concerning, but if I’m going to be honest, it probably is better than most drivers.
Yeah, just using video imagery to detect things seems absurd and dangerous. I hope no one is actually doing this, and this is just some proof-of-concept test with little relevance to how autonomous vehicles work.
This is disturbingly plausible. There will be new laws about how people use streets/the spaces around streets because of this. Though I suspect a good bit of the regulatory impact of autonomous vehicles is going to be hard to predict.
But pedestrians also spend time in roadways and will have the same issue.
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I think pedestrian detection is actually already pretty good in ml models.
edit: The problem of detecting pedestrians, and bikes have fairly different characteristics. Pedestrian detection is already something built in to cars.
This is just a way of blaming the bicyclist or pedestrian for the accident…
Oh, he wasn’t wearing a transponder when he went outside? Then his death is is fault.
I’m all for self driving features in automobiles, but I’m also for foot traffic having it’s right of way and ease. Every time I decide to walk or bike instead of hopping in my car, I’m freeing up more space on the road for other cars.
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RFID works on radio bands. It’s in the name Radio Frequency ID.
And honestly, it seems to me that computer vision isn’t the tool to use for sensing and tracking fast moving bits of metal. The armed forces already have developed tech for that, and it’s quite mature now: RADAR.
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