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Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

theatlantic.com

71–80 of 146 posts

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#71
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occassionally come across construction that is marked in an unusual way - at 65 miles an hour when the speed limit is 75. Also, when they are changing freeways and restriping them (leaving the original old faded lanes and before new lines go up) sometimes it's confusing to me and the traffic is flowing at 80 miles an hour, IIRC this was happening on 880 for a while about 10 years back. If the AI is confused by a ro…

Aren't those examples in which it'd be fine for it to be confused? That confusion shouldn't lead to any dangerous situations, just a different speed than other cars. It would also be interesting to know whether Waymo factors in other cars' behavior. If everyone is going 80 while the speed limit is 65, will it factor that in and go 80 or keep with the speed limit?

>>> If everyone is going 80 while the speed limit is 65, will it factor that in and go 80 or keep with the speed limit?

No, that's illegal to drive over the speed limit.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#72

Unless I didn't understand correctly, on the animated image of the car turning, which included a wireframe representation of the scene, as well as the cameras: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/W... The generated geometry doesn't seem to include the Bike that quickly passes behind the car at the intersection ...

The video is a real event where the car behaved suboptimally. It stopped because it couldn't understand what it should do about the bike.

The wireframe is an artificial simulation that is inspired by the same scenario.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#73
post #16

> for an average of once every 890 miles, or 0.80 disengagements per 1,000 miles. Isn’t that 1.12~ per 1000mi?

Wow, and I must think we're looking to squeeze ~3 more orders of magnitude or more of the reliability before going full driverless ~(1m miles/disengagement)

Those were the numbers for a year ago.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#74

Self driving cars is based on machine learning which is basically processing massive amounts of past data. This is great for routine situations and it seems Waymo is making good progress covering most of these. However the key weakness is the lack of true intelligence. When anything unusual or unexpected happens, the best it can do is simply safely shutdown and wait for a human to intervene. And the car can't really…

[deleted]

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#75
Great to see such progress made by Waymo and Co. But as the Murphy's law says, if something might break, it will eventually break. With possibly millions of self driving cars and trillions of unique situations, its inevitable that someone will get hurt. So my question is: what kind of progress is being made to draft a legal framework for situation in which I rode my bike in bike lane and for whatever reason self-driving vehicle struck me. Who do I go after in regards to my pilling up medical expenses? Do I sue driver? The car company? The company who delivered self-driving hardware? The software manufacturer? I get that self-driving cars comes with incredible advantages: less crashes (hopefully), no drink drivers, etc. But a legal framework for such automobiles should be in works as we speak.

Edited: of course Murphy's law; thanks for pointing it out!

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#76
post #60
post #41

Looks like this is the location of the test facility they talk about... https://www.google.com.au/maps/@37.3705986,-120.5747932,237m... Interesting choice of name for their Expressway... EDIT: Apple maps has up to date satellite imagery https://maps.apple.com/?q=37.3718,-120.5749&t=k

Curious - does anyone know why the Apple maps redirect to Google maps? I'm on Chrome.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/22/mapsception/

Apparently it's been doing this for years, and in different platforms.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#77
post #41

Looks like this is the location of the test facility they talk about... https://www.google.com.au/maps/@37.3705986,-120.5747932,237m... Interesting choice of name for their Expressway... EDIT: Apple maps has up to date satellite imagery https://maps.apple.com/?q=37.3718,-120.5749&t=k

StreetView shows one of the cars at work - https://www.google.com.au/maps/@37.3693527,-120.5767177,3a,6...

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#78

Great to see such progress made by Waymo and Co. But as the Murphy's law says, if something might break, it will eventually break. With possibly millions of self driving cars and trillions of unique situations, its inevitable that someone will get hurt. So my question is: what kind of progress is being made to draft a legal framework for situation in which I rode my bike in bike lane and for whatever reason self-driv…

I think you meant Murphy's law. Moore's law is the one about transistor density doubling every x years.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#79
post #46

There's a lot of misunderstanding about self-driving. Mostly because nobody is publishing much. If you want to do it right, you start with geometry. The first step is capturing range imagery and grinding it down to a 3D model of the world. This tells you where you physically can go. That's where we were at the DARPA Grand Challenge over a decade ago. Then comes moving object popout. What out there isn't a stationary…

Chris Urmson's SXSW video: https://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#80

Unless I didn't understand correctly, on the animated image of the car turning, which included a wireframe representation of the scene, as well as the cameras: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/W... The generated geometry doesn't seem to include the Bike that quickly passes behind the car at the intersection ...

The bike is shown as a red wireframe.
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