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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

#21

Post by agumonkey »

nkoren wrote: post #15

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 chal…

What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).

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

#22

Post by semi-extrinsic »

uptown wrote: post #18

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…

Wikipedia covers the legal aspects reasonably well, with a map of state laws.

"In 2016, 7 states (Nevada, California, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, and Tennessee), along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws for autonomous vehicles."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Legislation

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

#23

Post by chatmasta »

uptown wrote: post #18

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…

It's obviously a complicated subject, but here's a good place to start reading about it: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/Automated_Drivin...

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

#24

Post by rsfern »

jbb555 wrote: post #8

I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does. There are cone…

All these challenges are exactly why one would want to collect driving data in Pittsburgh, it seems to me.

I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.

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

#25

Post by jayjay71 »

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…

This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations.

Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet).

But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project.

Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.

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

#26

Post by Digit-Al »

uptown wrote: post #18

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…

From what I gather, autonomous cars are not legal by default in the US, but some (many?) states have now passed laws governing their use.

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

#27

Post by valarauca1 »

agumonkey wrote: post #21
nkoren wrote: post #15

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 chal…

What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).

What you need to understand the auto industry plans their product lines 20 years in advance. Design/testing of components takes a non-trivial amount of time.

When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame.

Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.

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

#28

Post by theandrewbailey »

I saw one of these a month ago when I was biking around the North Shore (downtown Pittsburgh). Its cameras on top were far more conspicuous than the renders in the article, though.

This article said it would pick people up downtown, but how far would they go to drop off? The golden triangle is mostly grid-based, but go elsewhere in the city and the road topology gets jacked up fast (like Boston), especially in the south and west. Its idiosyncrasies took some getting used to, after living in flatter regions with gridded streets for several years (central Ohio, Salt Lake). In those places, if you want to go somewhere, you start driving in its general direction; in Pittsburgh, it's not uncommon to go in the opposite direction for a while, since the roads don't connect that way.

The article also mentioned bridges being a problem. In Pittsburgh, that's a big problem, since it supposedly has more bridges than any other city in the world.

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

#29

Post by jbb555 »

rsfern wrote: post #24
jbb555 wrote: post #8

I can understand self driving cars eventually being practical on long simple roads. But I can't even imagine how one could get to my house. My road has cars parked on both sides. Sometimes vans. Sometimes they almost block the road. Sometimes there is a car coming the other way and you have to look for a space to pull into to so they can pass, or maybe back up 1/4 of a mile. Or hope the other car does. There are cone…

All these challenges are exactly why one would want to collect driving data in Pittsburgh, it seems to me. I saw a heavily instrumented Uber car driving down Liberty two days ago.

I guess that makes sense. And they can solve issues and make improvements one at a time untill it's good enough I guess. But I doubt that will be any time soon

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

#30

Post by jayjay71 »

agumonkey wrote: post #21
nkoren wrote: post #15

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 chal…

What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).

Everybody wants to jump straight to 4, because 3 is actually dangerous and likely to cause deaths as people are lulled into a false sense of safety. The question is how long will it take? Some people say 2 years, some people say 20.
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