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Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

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Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#71

Post by rimliu »

rwmj wrote: post #66
foxylad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when that bug is fixed, assuming modern update practices, it is fixed for everyone. In effect, human drivers can only learn from their own mistakes whereas autonomous systems learn from every mistake made by their system's drivers.

But can you really fix a bug in a machine learning algorithm? Sure, you can retrain it on the data which caused the crash, but could that mean you created another bug somewhere else?

That's exactly why I am not looking forward for self-driving cars. Rash drivers in most cases do know they are doing something stupid and dangerous (like going way over speed limit, overtaking where visibility is limited, etc.) AI on the other hand is prone to "honest mistakes" which can be deadly.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#72

Post by chaos0 »

pd0wm wrote: post #8
Animats wrote: post #5

Autonomous driving based purely on machine learning from vision is scary. Machine learning is, after all, a statistical method. It's going to do really great most of the time, and really badly once in a while.

The exact same can be said about human drivers. Why do we demand that autonomous driving is 100% safe? I would be completely fine with autonomous cars that sometimes crash, but are still less likely to do so than with human drivers.

let's assume that neither humans or machines are perfect drivers. but there is a non-zero probability that the machine can do something nonsensical that a sane human would never do (due to some unknown edge case). who do you trust more to be your driver?

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#73

Post by w0utert »

nsxwolf wrote: post #19
pd0wm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact same can be said about human drivers. Why do we demand that autonomous driving is 100% safe? I would be completely fine with autonomous cars that sometimes crash, but are still less likely to do so than with human drivers.

We accept that human drivers kill thousands upon thousands of people. We won't tolerate deaths from automation even in the single digits. That may not be rational but it's also unlikely to change.

I never understand why it has to be either one or the other. Either we accept deaths caused by human drivers, or we go full autonomous and we accept deaths by software errors.

The way I see it, AI assisted driving is the way to go. Fully autonomous driving is, at least in my opinion, a pipe dream. No amount of testing will ever be able to prove an AI is safer than a human in all situations. They might be safer in some though, e.g. highway drives, quiet roads at night etc. So instead of pouring in vast amounts of money developing fully autonomous vehicles, why not spend it on improving the existing AI assistance features that already exist, so we can prevent most human errors, without introducing new AI failure modes.

Note that this means we should all forget about the dream of not having to pay attention on the road because 'the car drives itself', and that we should actually dial back things like Tesla autopilot, which venture too close to 'car drives itself'. The driver should be in control, until he/she makes a mistake, then the AI should prevent worse.

On a side note: people comparing plane autopilots to point out the merits of fully autonomous driving are really missing the point, there is no AI in avionics whatsoever.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#74

Post by ghaff »

w0utert wrote: post #73
nsxwolf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We accept that human drivers kill thousands upon thousands of people. We won't tolerate deaths from automation even in the single digits. That may not be rational but it's also unlikely to change.

I never understand why it has to be either one or the other. Either we accept deaths caused by human drivers, or we go full autonomous and we accept deaths by software errors. The way I see it, AI assisted driving is the way to go. Fully autonomous driving is, at least in my opinion, a pipe dream. No amount of testing will ever be able to prove an AI is safer than a human in all situations. They might be safer in som…

I do think we'll get to fully autonomous for some significant useful subset of driving such as paved public roads and can probably do things to help out the AIs with corner cases (beacons, etc.). That said, I actually agree that the last 10% that gets things to reliable Johnny-cab level are probably a lot further than many are assuming. Given the level of investment and advances that have been made I'm probably even more optimistic than I was, but I still think it could be 30-40 years before you can order a robo-Uber in Manhattan.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#75

Post by alexhornbake »

zaro wrote: post #68
alexhornbake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, thanks for the additional info. Still seems like a bad idea. Based on your assertion, what happens when the RTOS/microcontroller does not receive a "decision" before the scheduling deadline? Many things can hang a Linux box... the reason why RTOS exists is because nothing can stop the scheduler. I would be very curious to hear from the Apollo developers. What is the intended platform and developer audience? Is…

There are way to make Linux an RTOS, including work on pushing RT deterministic scheduler in the mainline[1]. [1] https://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

Ahhh... Found it... The project has it's own Kernel. I stand corrected. This is super cool. https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo-kernel

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#76

Post by devy »

nsxwolf wrote: post #42
devy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, Robots and automated machines (not the autonomous vehicles) still killed/injured a few dozen people since 1984 according to U.S. Department of Labor. [1] [1]: https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/AccidentSearch.search?acc_keyw... Worldwide stats will be far more than that. We've accepted it, haven't we?

They're freak accidents. We wouldn't tolerate deaths day in and day out to the tune of 40,200 in the US in 2016. ..too lazy to find and paste stat from mobile

You said we won't accept those deaths "even in the single digit", not 40k+ deaths, which is a few orders of magnitude higher.

Also I don't understand why we would accept freak accidents but not other accidents? An accdient is an accident. A death is tragic regardless what caused it.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#77

Post by nsxwolf »

devy wrote: post #76
nsxwolf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're freak accidents. We wouldn't tolerate deaths day in and day out to the tune of 40,200 in the US in 2016. ..too lazy to find and paste stat from mobile

You said we won't accept those deaths "even in the single digit", not 40k+ deaths, which is a few orders of magnitude higher. Also I don't understand why we would accept freak accidents but not other accidents? An accdient is an accident. A death is tragic regardless what caused it.

We don't accept the robot deaths. Any time one happens people scramble to "make sure this never happens again". When someone dies in a car accident, we yawn.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#78

Post by nsxwolf »

mwfunk wrote: post #56
nsxwolf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count me out on ever contributing to a project like this. I really don't want to be a test case.

This isn't because it's unreliable or because you (the developer) would be a test case. I mean, I don't know anything about this project so I can't vouch for it, but pretty much every open source project in this area is obligated to have this kind of verbiage and it has nothing to do with the quality of the project. This is so you can contribute to an open source project without worrying about some random person suin…

Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't want to be a test case for the disclaimer.

Just because you write it down doesn't make it so. Even if a lawyer wrote it.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#79

Post by mwfunk »

nsxwolf wrote: post #78
mwfunk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't because it's unreliable or because you (the developer) would be a test case. I mean, I don't know anything about this project so I can't vouch for it, but pretty much every open source project in this area is obligated to have this kind of verbiage and it has nothing to do with the quality of the project. This is so you can contribute to an open source project without worrying about some random person suin…

Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't want to be a test case for the disclaimer . Just because you write it down doesn't make it so. Even if a lawyer wrote it.

But if there's no disclaimer at all, then someone can sue you, even if the whole case is BS and the software you contributed to wasn't at fault. It's still something you'd have to deal with. Never contribute to something that doesn't have this sort of disclaimer- it means both that you would be leaving yourself open to lawsuits (justified or not), and that the people running the project don't know what they're doing.

If an open source project in this area doesn't have a disclaimer like this, the people running that project are clueless, and if they're clueless about that, they're almost certainly clueless about the much more complicated technical stuff, so it wouldn't be a project which would be desirable to contribute to in the first place.

Re: Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

#80

Post by mhue »

pd0wm wrote: post #8
Animats wrote: post #5

Autonomous driving based purely on machine learning from vision is scary. Machine learning is, after all, a statistical method. It's going to do really great most of the time, and really badly once in a while.

The exact same can be said about human drivers. Why do we demand that autonomous driving is 100% safe? I would be completely fine with autonomous cars that sometimes crash, but are still less likely to do so than with human drivers.

There are results showing that machine learning can be completely fooled by images that are slightly modified, so little that the human eye can not perceive any difference. Have a look at the images in this paper on "adversarial examples": https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572
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