Driverless cars learn from landscape pics before going off-road

Where we're going we don't need roads, just a large database of pictures. A team at New York University have taught a machine learning system to drive off-road by showing it photos of different landscapes. It's one thing to train driverless cars to navigate city streets or highways. But taking robot drivers off-road is tricky because the surroundings are highly variable, says Karl Iagnemma at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wasn't involved in the work. It is hard to give a robot an exhaustive set of driving rules for every environment.