It is perfectly possible to make an autonomous robot without having a built-in map. Stanley did it, and Google's self driving car project is mostly guys from SAIL who worked on that or related projects. You can do it, it's just not nearly reliable enough to actually do on the highway at high speed with squishy people inside and all around yet. It's not out of the question that someone will make it work eventually, but I don't think that someone will be working at Tesla either.Google is building a map of the Alps and refining their stopwatch. Tesla is pretending that eventually they'll be able to AI their way to driving better than you. The former is a well-defined problem. The latter is an open-ended clusterfuck.
Your perspective is appreciated. Am I completely off base in characterizing this as "GIS from hell" vs. "The Bicentennial Man?" 'cuz google's approach seems to be a definable amount of data while Tesla's seems to be a whistling-in-the-dark systems approach.
If you don't have a premade map you have to generate the map while you figure out where in the map you are. This is called, creatively, simultaneous localization and mapping, and abbreviated SLAM because DARPA likes cute acronyms. Doing that requires the robot to explore a bit, essentially learning what Google tells its cars while trying to drive. I think you've mentioned playing with a Roomba before. You know how it just kind of zips around randomly at first? That's what it's doing. Now imagine it weighing N tons. Roomba isn't the smartest robot in the world, but all I'm aware of are closer to Roomba than something you want on the road.