{"id":179562,"date":"2018-01-01T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/01\/01\/its-called-a-windshield-wiper\/"},"modified":"2018-01-01T21:16:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-02T02:16:00","slug":"its-called-a-windshield-wiper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/01\/01\/its-called-a-windshield-wiper\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Called a Windshield Wiper"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw an article talking about how Silicon Valley is a terrible place for testing self driving cars<\/a> because the weather there is too good.<\/p>\n

Of course there is not a whole bunch of snow there, but there are ski resorts about 100 miles away, and mountains, etc.<\/p>\n

They also make the point that this is a tremendously<\/b> difficult problem.<\/p>\n

The truth is that it is not a big problem.  The solution is called a windshield wiper.<\/p>\n

In fact, I spent nearly a year working on a windshield wiper system for the LIDAR sensor clear on the US Army’s now canceled MULE (Multifunction Utility\/Logistics and Equipment ) program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The windshield wiper was complex, because the sensor covered about 200 degrees, and the windows were faceted with sharp edges, and I had to design a linkage to make the wiper follow the profile, and EMI\/RFI shielded cabling, and gas tight seals, etc. \u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

This is not trivial, but the solutions are straightforward, and California can accommodate pretty much all of the environmental conditions with the exceptions of tropical rain forest and tundra.<\/p>\n

The real problem with the self-driving cars being developed in Silicon Valley is that the Silicon Valley ethos simply does not work for things that have to work outside of a computer.<\/p>\n

The debacles at Theranos and Juicero<\/a> are classic examples as to what happens Silicon Valley tries to conquer the real world, it turns to complete sh%$.<\/p>\n

There may be self-driving vehicles capable of driving on any road before I die, but they will not come from the minds of Google, or Tesla, or Uber.<\/p>\n

It might come from the NSA, it might come from Detroit, but truly autonomous cars are not cute cat GIFs, so I don’t expect them to come from the Randian supermen of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw an article talking about how Silicon Valley is a terrible place for testing self driving cars because the weather there is too good. Of course there is not a whole bunch of snow there, but there are ski resorts about 100 miles away, and mountains, etc. They also make the point that this …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[490,679,721,471,596],"class_list":["post-179562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-hack-journalism","tag-research","tag-robotics","tag-transportation","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179562"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}