I worked for a number of years on making invisible fiducials that can appear only in infrared, and am one of the chief inventors on 3M's smart code. The idea was that on any retroreflective surface you can place this fiducial sticker and relay some information. We were originally looking at approximately 64 bits of information. This isn't a ton, but we thought it a good balance of error correction, and module (the pixels in the code) size.

At least from an IR perspective, it was generally loved by nearly everyone we spoke to, but there was no takers in the end due to the IR requirement and such cameras not being everywhere yet.

Here is a link to some of our first work. That picture of a stop sign is our first prototype with hand cut special film.

https://www.businessinsider.com/3m-hides-tech-in-sides-to-he...

And punk kids would be covering them over with stickers that machine read as something entirely different. :P Not as easy a thing to crack as it could be. You could cryptographically sign them (sign your signs!) and maybe encode approximate GPS coordinates to prevent them from being moved too far from their original position, but that’s a lot of data to encode in a marker.

Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?

Natural feature tracking is cooler. I mean.... little black boxes are alright but just establishing that a bespoke 3D shape or hierarchy of shapes to orient your targeting looks less crappy and has a lot more interesting potential.

One time many many years ago I went to kinkos and printed giant fiducial squares like 48"x48" and wheat pasted them all over Austin, TX to do large at scale AR with markers. Just putting giant dongs on down town condos and stuff. Good times.

I always thought coded signs that also emit some sort of signal to match would make the most sense .. and some sort of consortium to set standards.

Then you could zone off areas that are designated safe for self-driving, among other things.

It would seem like the attack vector for this technology is SUPER simple to pull off. How do you trust self-driving cars that use this in a world where graffiti exists?

It could complement but not replace a general purpose system, and anyway the bigger problem is not navigation but avoiding other cars, pedestrians and obstacles on the road.

Since your solution is based on sending someone to mark the roads, why not use the same someone to simply build a map of the road, Google Maps style with higher accuracy? I think there are a few startups doing just that now.

This won't work.

Because it's incredibly vulnerable in an adversarial world. (Human readable has a human in the loop, and so can adjust for the worst adversarial attacks. Machine readable can't)

What about attaching normal cars with "beacons" that ping every 5ms? Cheaper?