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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”

#161

Post by jccooper »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
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…

"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 the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed." I think you misread that article. Someone built their own toy implem…

While they did use their own simple DNN classifier (because they couldn't find one), it was treated as a black box for purposes of the attack. A more robust classifier (probably using multiple methods) would be more resistant to attack, but the attack would still work, just the changes would be more obvious. At some point you hit "human-recognizable" but it's unclear where that point is.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #137
strebler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the m…

Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by lern_too_spel »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #137
strebler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the m…

Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.

California allows drivers to self-insure. The existing auto insurers are going to lose that business to automated taxi fleets.

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

#164

Post by ceejayoz »

throwawayjava wrote: post #148
ceejayoz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not one pilot, though. It's two pilots, times two shifts a day, plus some extras to cover vacation, sickness, etc. There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.

And still, the pilot portion of the cost of operation for planes is in the single digits. You barely scrape into the double digits (maybe 20% MAX, closer to 10 I think) if you count all labor.

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/how-airlines-make-less-tha...

> "With a net profit margin of just 2.4%, airlines only retain $5.42 per passenger carried," said Tony Tyler CEO of International Air Transport Association (IATA) at the group's 70th AGM in Doha, Qatar.

I suspect they're interested in single-digit cost reductions.

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

#165

Post by ghaff »

Eridrus wrote: post #153
ghaff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Leonard at MIT is one long-time (going back to 2007 DARPA challenge) researcher who is very skeptical. e.g. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Driverless-car... "I think that driving exposes fundamental issues in intelligence, fundamental issues in how the brain works. And we might be a very long way away.”

I think his research area (SLAM) might blind him a bit to the engineering side of things. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping is great if it works, but for something with high enough value... you can just map it from the start, and it makes your problem much easier. Which seems to be the approach people are taking.

Mapping does make things easier and it arguably jump-started the current wave of autonomous vehicle work. But then you have to move beyond a precise map of how the world is supposed to be to how the world actually is including all the unpredictable behaviors of humans in the space.

Having listened to Leonard speak, his skepticism seems to mostly be around how you deal with all the things like left hand turns in busy traffic, police waving people around an accident, etc. that happen on a daily basis.

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

#166

Post by rayiner »

vamin wrote: post #127
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 disagree with the analogy to speech recognition. What makes speech recognition difficult is that it's highly dependent on context (sounds the same, but means something different depending on surrounding words, what the conversation is about, or even who you're speaking with). With driving, you should be able to make a good decision with just the instantaneous state, given enough information about that state (object…

Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turns. How does a self-driving car handle that without understanding context?

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

#167

Post by manmal »

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…

Granted, but there is arguably a lot more money behind autonomous driving than there ever was behind speech recognition and synthesis. It was a different problem space, but the situation is probably comparable to the space race - the winner will dominate a new market of hundreds of billions in size. The motivation is really really strong, and with it comes lots of funding and talent.

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

#168

Post by dperfect »

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…

A little more context on the speech recognition part: I remember going to a trade show (many years ago) where a representative from one of the major speech recognition companies was showing off the technology. He wasn't just dictating text, but was also using the software to control the computer. I was floored by it. I was 100% convinced we had arrived at that dream of intelligent voice-computer interaction.

I've felt the same way after watching various autonomous driving demos (like Tesla's[1]). But then I remember my experience of actually trying the same speech recognition software myself; under unrehearsed real-world conditions with edge cases and human mistakes, the technology performed terribly. Any "intelligence" I'd seen in the demo was essentially smoke and mirrors.

Granted, current autonomous vehicle technology incorporates a lot more artificial intelligence than those speech recognition demos ever did, but the challenge is also significantly greater (and more life-critical). Sure, your sensors and cameras might be able to read signage correctly in 99% of conditions, but when there's graffiti on the sign at night during heavy rain, all bets are off. The human driver may have difficulty also, but the human driver has real intelligence and life experience in a variety of domains, enabling them to make inferences based on more than just statistical probabilities.

In my opinion, prior to solving all the edge cases at an acceptable level using AI, we'll solve a different problem allowing us to sidestep many of those challenges; we'll incrementally start building (and converting to) smart roads where only smart vehicles are allowed. Obviously it won't be everywhere, but the most important routes will be covered, and your safety on those routes will be much higher than it would be on traditional roads with AI or human drivers.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

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

#169

Post by rayiner »

linsomniac wrote: post #160

The Roman Rule: The one who says it can't be done shouldn't interrupt the one doing it. I agree that it's harder than, say, Musk or Waymo's teams want to admit. But it also seems to me like Toyota has a bit of sour grapes, everyone around them is doing interesting, useful things, and Toyota is stuck at lane departure and adaptive cruise control and blind spot detection, all of which work pretty well for them.

Pretty rich assertion, given that Tesla isn't much better, and Waymo doesn't have a product yet.

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

#170

Post by cmurf »

trekky1700 wrote: post #55
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…

From what a pilot told me, I believe the A320 he flies can take off, fly, and land totally on its own. I'm sure the same is true for other planes. Also, if I recall correctly, he said in certain conditions it's against regulations for a pilot to be manually controlling the aircraft, such as landings in high winds.

Literally none of this is true.

"land totally on its own" suggests autonomy. In reality it's a three part certification: pilot, plane (autopilot), and runway. There is only one zero visibility landing system, and that's the ILS CAT IIIc.[1] If there's no ground capability for the runway (does not exist or is down for maintenance) then the plane can't do a CAT IIIc landing.

In practice there is no such thing as landing without an explicit clearance to land. Clearance is given by ATC to the pilot via AM radio. The autopilot has no language listening or speaking skills at all. Numerous clearance modifications happen during a flight, given verbally.[2]

The plane also doesn't taxi itself into position, and it doesn't retract or subsequently deploy landing gear. Many tasks aren't available to the autopilot, nor are many transitions between tasks.

About the last statement, FAR 91.3(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. You could construe FAR 91.13(a)No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. as requiring the pilot to use automation if the aircraft manufacturer requires it in certain situations. Otherwise, no, and I have only ever heard of autopilots needing to be disabled in high wind situations.

[1] Example instrument approach procedure. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see it explicitly requires ground navaids and a certified crew. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF

[2] Example STAR which most airports don't have, but when they do you'll even see these are really just designed to allow ATC to "plug in" a smaller subset of data like an altitude or speed, without having to recite the entire arrival instructions. Can it be automated? No, because the variables are delivered by voice. The STAR is useless without the variables, and variables are useless without the STAR. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF

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