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Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

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Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#11

Post by tajen »

thearn4 wrote: post #3

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

I'm surprised by their technology:

> The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets.

If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes.

Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#12

Post by raverbashing »

sbarre wrote: post #7

I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

In the same way McD and other places are replacing attendants with tablets. Or, in a similar vein, how Netflix replaced sending DVDs through the mail with the Internet

It's a job, not a career

And I suspect there's some 3 years at least before self-driving is "production ready"

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#14

Post by aedron »

It feels like a lot of what Uber does these days is just hyping up the stock price. Of course that is a very short term strategy, if your ever more audacious announcements keep falling flat. We saw a lot of this in the last throes of the dot-com bubble, before the inevitable implosion.

As for this announcement, does Uber have any credibility in this field, which combines the most individually complex AI, robotics and regulatory work that has ever been attempted? Hell, in any non-trivial engineering feats?

Also, Volvo has very active ongoing self-driving research going on. I have to wonder how much of this is Uber's supposed crack team of field experts, and how much is simply a partnership with Volvo delivering the technology.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#15

Post by nkoren »

Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.

This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#16

Post by CSMastermind »

sbarre wrote: post #7

I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

If you listen to speeches by Uber's founder (for example his TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get...) you'll hear him say that he thinks self-driving cars are decades off.

Uber wants to be the leader in the field because it's a threat to their business model but I don't think your average Uber driver has much to worry about for a long time.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#17

Post by pythia__ »

sbarre wrote: post #7

I wonder how Uber drivers feel about working for a company that is actively trying to make them obsolete. Not passing judgement or anything, just kind of a strange thing to contemplate.. Uber kept saying they were disrupting the taxi industry by letting more people participate when really in the end they're trying to remove the people from the equation altogether.

People may yet make a comeback as a premium service since they can do things that self-driving cars can't like help a passenger carry bags.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#18

Post by uptown »

Are self-driving cars legal in the United States by law, or just due to the absence of law? Seems like vehicular traffic has always had fairly tight regulations around their operation, but I'm stunned by the speed at which cars that drive themselves are hitting the road. Sure, we've had cruise-control, and cars have been adding things like auto-braking and lane-assist. Have they just taken that feature-creep further to facilitate self-driving under existing laws? Or are they simply able to do-so because they all necessitate a human driver to supposedly be alert, awake and aware? Maybe I missed it, but to me this just seems like something that would warrant some discussion before self-driving vehicles are allowed on the roads, even if the conclusion is the same.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#19

Post by rattray »

tajen wrote: post #11
thearn4 wrote: post #3

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or la…

It's possible that they don't rely on the minutiae of the maps, just use them for planning.

For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly".

On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.

Re: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month

#20

Post by [deleted] »

tajen wrote: post #11
thearn4 wrote: post #3

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or la…

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