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Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

wsj.com

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Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#331

Post by Fej »

speakingmachine wrote: post #240
Animats wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Everybody who's looked at this seriously agrees. The aviation industry has looked hard at that issue for a long time. Watch "Children of the Magenta".[1] This is a chief pilot of American Airlines talking to pilots about automation dependency in 1997. Watch this if you have…

If we're going to borrow from aviation, why don't automakers develop some rudimentary automation (not autonomy) that would help avoid the most common kinds of crashes? For example something that might be automated in a modern aircraft is change flight level. The pilot can command a change to a given flight level and the automation takes care of it. Why don't we have a "change lanes" command for cars? Changing lanes i…

Tons of cars nowadays come with emergency automatic braking.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#332

Post by maxcan »

crocal wrote: post #81

The only industry to have produced truly driverless public transportation systems is the rail industry. Not aeronautics. Rail systems happens to be my business and what I read here makes me very worried. I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It's not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying "see"? It's about demonstrating /by design/ that the /com…

You think the rail industry understands what safety means? Trains have literally one degree of freedom in their controls - speed up and slow down. In spite of the simplicity we still see high fatality train crashes with regularity. Some how sticking people in a paper thin aluminum tube 6 miles up going 600mph can be done with zero fatalities but we can't get trains to stop killing people.

I'm ranting here, but you're on an undeservedly high horse.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#333

Post by tomcam »

itengelhardt wrote: post #312
jacquesm wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

That's not correct... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=us+traffic+fatalities+by+year

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#334

Post by Animats »

asteli wrote: post #203
Animats wrote: post #78

Tesla's system doesn't have enough sensors. Musk forced his engineers to try to do this almost entirely with vision processing, and that was a terrible decision. Vision processing isn't that good yet. Everybody else uses LIDAR. I've been saying for years that the right approach was to take the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR and get the cost down. I first saw that demonstrated in 2004 on an…

I've seen you plug flash LIDAR (especially ASC's unit) several times here, but is anyone actually using it on SDVs? I've seen things that could have been flash LIDAR on test cars, but never as the primary sensor. I worked on a team that evaluated the ASC unit a few years ago, but they found it unusable due to bloom issues. Has that changed?

I don't know how Continental is doing about staring into the sun. Here's a recent overview of flash LIDAR detector options.[1] That's more about the detectors used for looking down from aircraft, where ranges may be thousands of meters. Automobiles don't need that kind of range.

Flash LIDAR has a tradeoff between range and field of view. You can concentrate your energy or fan it out. There's been some interest in systems where you can narrow the output beam when you need to. Or you can combine wide-beam short-range units with narrow-beam long range ones.

There are other flash LIDAR companies, but many of them are vaporware. Quanergy, which bills itself as "the leading provider of solid state LIDAR sensors" announced a unit last year, but doesn't seem to have shipped. Velodyne wants to come out with a solid state product. TetraView is trying for a low-end semiconductor solution that uses common sensors. Luminar and LeddarTech want to use MEMS mirrors.

A long-range narrow-beam MEMS-steerable flash LIDAR might be useful. Look out 300m in the direction you're going when at high speed, and use other wide-angle sensors for a side view and in cluttered city environments.

Somebody is going to get this working at an acceptable price point reasonably soon.

[1] http://spie.org/newsroom/6466-comparing-flash-lidar-detector...

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#335

Post by mymacbook »

empath75 wrote: post #8

The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me. Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Neither the driver nor the car manufacturer will have clear responsibility when there is an accident. The driver will blame the system for failing and the manufacturer will blame the driver for…

I have to disagree as an owner/operator of a vehicle with this feature set. I consider it a major improvement to traditional cruise control, a modern iteration. When viewing it from the angle of full self-driving / autonomy (level 5) I can see how this argument can be framed, but that's not how us mere mortals view it.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#336

Post by alanh »

itengelhardt wrote: post #312
jacquesm wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

The WSJ article includes NHTSA data indicating 'only' 35,000 traffic fatalities per yeah. Where are you getting this 1.3 million number from? That would be equivalent to a full 1% of US population dying on the road every 2.5 years

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#337

Post by ericd »

itengelhardt wrote: post #312
jacquesm wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

That number sounds like the worldwide number, not US. Many places have much, much worse road fatalities per capita.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#338

Post by neltnerb »

aptwebapps wrote: post #304
ams6110 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you should be checking your dashboard instruments every few seconds. Temperature, oil pressure, speed, fuel. I'm constantly doing this while driving. Road ahead. Mirrors. Instruments. Road ahead. over and over.

What are you driving that you need to check your temperature, oil pressure, and fuel every few seconds? If you don't, and you didn't have to check your speed, you could shorten your cycle to mirrors and road.

With a hot air balloon you have lots of time to respond.

Though I'd check my ballast too, and probably read a book.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#339

Post by pilif »

kuschku wrote: post #223
eclipxe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Tesla's do not use the car in front to switch lanes.

It depends on what mode you set it to, but under some circumstances, it does.

What would these circumstances be? I have never seen my car do this.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#340

Post by Dylan16807 »

anindha wrote: post #245
abalone wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you'd draw that conclusion. It seems possible to have a workable, purely optical solution. Our workable solution today relies purely on optical (human drivers).

Cameras don't have the same dynamic range of the human eye. A more fair test would be giving someone remote control of a Tesla with only access to the video footage. I think cameras will hit parity with the human eye, but the question is will it happen before or after Lidar becomes more affordable and compact.

The eye's dynamic range at any point in time is actually pretty bad. It's easy to beat the range of the retina with a camera sensor. The human eye can also adjust iris size and light sensitivity, and a camera can match it by adjusting iris size and exposure time. You're probably want a secondary camera for full night vision, but that's not very relevant for driving with headlights anyway.
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