Flutterby™! : Self-driving cars

Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on self-driving cars at IROS 2011 (YouTube, part 1 of 3), Part 2, Part 3.

A lot of really fantastic observations here, from the reality that the rules as laid out in the driver's handbook aren't actually practical for navigating intersections, to the notions that in vehicle behavior "We tuned ours for Pittsburgh driving" means that California drivers did a lot of honking at it.

And the unforeseen, like the fact that in one of the DARPA challenges, the JumboTron interfered with GPS receivers.

IEEE Spectrum article on the talks.