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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

#41

Post by taxicabjesus »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #10
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.

I always talk to the drivers about their feelings and so on when taking Uber. Maybe my data is skewed but most accept it as inevitable and are not worried much as they have other side jobs. The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation. We simply cannot afford to leave people out as we mov…

> The cab drivers are the ones who must be anxious. It will be really bad if they cannot be retrained for other jobs as it will add to the existing frustration around automation.

I used my "training" - a very expensive CS degree - to drive a cab. I developed a nerve condition in college, so really I just suffered through the program without becoming competent as a programmer. Also, I dance to the beat of my own drum, and do not take orders well. My kuro5hin.org (RIP) story "Humanity's Second-best Hope" [1] is about the seasonal job I had at Amazon, just before I started taxi driving.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/p/humanitys-second-best-hope.html

Cab driving offered me freedom to be my own boss. The cab company's rules were reasonable, and easy enough to comply with. As long as I paid my lease, I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted with my time. No one in the company's administration cared if I took a short break, or a long break, or spent the night in bed.

Something more important came up, and ridesharing ruined the economics of the business (Arizona makes it easy and cheap for anyone to start their own transportation company. The upstarts couldn't be bothered with playing fair), so I don't drive around in a taxi anymore.

I think these money-losing "ride sharing" companies were founded by people with delusions of grandeur and venture capitalists' money to burn. When they run out of their investors' money, the realities of transporting people from place to place will reassert themselves.

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

#42

Post by cgearhart »

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…

> ...will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes.

It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks.

> can't they do like the Kinect

This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.

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

#43

Post by johnward »

rando444 wrote: post #34
theandrewbailey wrote: post #28

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 so…

Knowing Pittsburgh, the amount of road and bridge construction that goes on there would also concern me, not to mention the condition of the roads. There's also a ton of roads that are extremely steep (multiple residential streets with an over 30% grade) which can be extremely dangerous in the winter. It's an interesting choice of a city for this for sure.

I'm sure they chose the city for CMU but I wonder if the driving challenges played a roll. Navigating downtown Pittsburgh is no fun if you aren't familiar with it. I mean it's not really fun if you are familiar either.

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

#44

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Retric wrote: post #36
jayjay71 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.

There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.

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

#45

Post by johnward »

nxzero wrote: post #6

As someone that follows lots of tech "trying to see the future" - to me Uber has the greatest hope of bring driving to the mainstream due to a number of factors. First, they have a lot of experience with litigation and working with local laws. They need to replace drivers, but unlike truck drivers - Uber will drive anywhere. Unlike trucks, there's the potential to allow the passenger to drive the car. Many more key r…

> bring driving to the mainstream

Did you mean self-driving ?

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

#47

Post by cgearhart »

rattray wrote: post #19
tajen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.

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

#48

Post by jayjay71 »

argonaut wrote: post #38
jayjay71 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

"Fundamental architectural failure" is a very bold claim to make given that absolutely no other approaches have worked as well as Google's for urban driving.

How do you know that? There hasn't been a competition since 2007, and that was before Google was involved.

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

#49

Post by jayjay71 »

Retric wrote: post #36
jayjay71 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.

The maps Google uses for their self-driving cars, as I understand it, require constant maintenance. Also just the amount of data is huge. If this weren't the case, surely they would have driven in many other places by now?

I would actually love for someone who works at Google to chime in here. It'd be great to find out their system is more robust than I think it is.

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

#50

Post by Retric »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.

There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.

2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.
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