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Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#101

Post by Eridrus »

gwbas1c wrote: post #79
Eridrus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones. Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not. Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https:/…

With software, it's always easy to make something appear to work. All the corner cases make something take 10-100x longer than the functional prototype. This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before…

Sure, some image classifiers can be fooled by some vandalism that requires a high degree of technical sophistication, but

a) Humans can be fooled by vandalising a stop sign too. The difference here is that the change is imperceptible to humans... but does this matter?

b) A lot of self-driving work leans heavily on maps which will know to expect a stop sign.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#102

Post by nayuki »

devmunchies wrote: post #93
gwbas1c wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With software, it's always easy to make something appear to work. All the corner cases make something take 10-100x longer than the functional prototype. This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before…

> a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.

How can you verify at a glance that the QR Code associated with a human-readable sign is correct?

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#103

Post by damontal »

brianwawok wrote: post #59
_m8fo wrote: post #14

Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI. If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no? EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the c…

Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the workplace? Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"

what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#104

Post by Fricken »

Level 5 is way out there. But at least from a technological standpoint, if Waymo isn't already at a minimum viable product for L4 commercial deployment, they're pretty damn close. Deploying 600 vehicles is a huge financial commitment, they wouldn't be doing it if they felt their self driving car project would remain in the science experiment phase for another decade. They were ready to roll in 2015 with their Koala cars, driving slowly on Mountainview roads, but were derailed by regulations.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#105

Post by saosebastiao »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #41
moxious wrote: post #12

It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news. This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong. The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverl…

Exactly. I park in a very small space in a busy city. While backing out I must monitor the street, pedestrians, and the cars parked to the front, back, and side of me. Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can really add up. What I…

> What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has changed.

I wish I could upvote this idea straight into the car manufacturers inboxes. Nothing more frustrating than having to sit through multiple light cycles cause the dipshit in front of you is taking a nap, conveniently waking up with enough time to get themselves through the light but not any of the people behind them.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#106

Post by dreamcompiler »

Completely agree with this. It will be ridiculously difficult to get to Level 5 automation in cars. It's decades away, not years. Ironically though, part of the reason it's so difficult is that during the transition the roads will still be populated with human-driven cars. If we passed laws to the effect that "as of date X, no human-driven vehicles or pedestrians will be allowed on roads in the set {Y}", we could get to Level 5 much faster.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#107

Post by keithly »

limeblack wrote: post #5

One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes are more complex but have lower…

Also, planes and trains have unionized employees who don't want give up their jobs to automation.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#108

Post by jholloway7 »

_m8fo wrote: post #14

Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI. If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no? EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the c…

Think about the difference between a specialized AI that can beat a grandmaster at chess (using heuristics) versus a generalized AI that can learn how to play chess and then figure out how to beat a grandmaster on its own.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#109

Post by oblio »

BeStaXP wrote: post #87

I think Toyota exists in a different dimension than the rest of us. Toyota is so convinced that the future of cars is hydrogen that their electric car efforts boil down to a four man team. Dinosaurs! As for self driving tech wasn't there a successful multi manufacturer trans Europe truck convoy last year? Self-driving tech is already at work at mines. Decades? Really, Toyota.

We'll, are you so sure that solving hydrogen delivery and storage is ultimately harder than making safe and cheap batteries for practical cars with an autonomy over 600km?

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#110

Post by jessriedel »

dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

I use Google voice dictation to transcribe emails and text messages on my phone constantly. Not like "I tried it for a week and then went back". I have been using it daily for months. It's now vastly faster than typing it in by hand on a phone, and even the per-word error rate is actually better than mobile typing.
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