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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”

#181

Post by cmurf »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #135
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:/…

MTA has 100+ years of legacy track. Imagine trying to retrofit anything into a 100-year-old codebase. Ouch.

In effect, aviation and automobile infrastructures likewise have 100 year old code bases. And for cars, it varies by state (and county and city but mostly by state).

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

#182

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> 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.

Yes and no. In any given Tesla article here you can also read many people claiming that "it's basically a solved problem and Tesla and Uber will be fully automated in just a couple of years", too.

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

#183

Post by cmurf »

colordrops wrote: post #91
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…

Modern airliners _are_ mostly autonomous, and can even land themselves if necessary. Pilots are there as a safety margin. I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.

Modern airlines are not mostly autonomous. I'll define it this way: remove the pilots from a flight at various stages along its route and see what happens. Multiple outcomes are possible but one is certain, it's not landing at the intended destination. If it were mostly autonomous, it'd land at destination at least some of the time. The chances of this happening today are 0.

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

#184

Post by cr0sh »

flunhat wrote: post #111

I've always had a hunch (and mind you, I have no proof of this, I'm just talking here) that the software required for a level 5 self driving car is, on some mathematical level, equivalent to the software needed to pass the Turing Test (w/out hacking the rules). In other words, if we have the capacity to do one of those things, we will have the capacity to do the other (in much the same way that seemingly unrelated pr…

So are you saying Waymo's cars are capable of passing the Turing Test? Because they are arguably at level 5 capability.

I highly doubt it, though.

The thing is, while I believe they are already at this level, their technology is obviously not perfect. It never will be. Perfection in any space of technology is just not possible, because perfection is not possible in the physical world for anything. Perfection is a mathematical abstract at best.

Instead, what we can hope to achieve is "better than human drivers", and Waymo's vehicles have certainly achieved that, imho. They have logged more miles with their self-driving vehicle technology than most people will drive any single car of their own, with an accident rate far below that of the average human driver.

For the accidents they have had, most of them were when the car was in manual mode, and for the rest, they were low-speed incidents. None of them, that occurred while in self-driving mode (that I am aware of) caused any injury or death to any occupant of the vehicle.

I'll leave this comment with this video, to show what was capable of autonomous vehicles in what now seems like the distant past (and I honestly know it wasn't, but time sure flies with this tech):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI

Note that this was in 2010, using the tech in Stanford's Junior car (tech that would eventually lead to Google's and later Waymo's vehicles), and far from perfect; I can guarantee you that the systems used are much more advanced and better at control today.

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

#185

Post by euyyn »

SEJeff wrote: post #54
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…

Planes are mostly automated. The pilots are involved for takeoff and landing or emergencies, but little else. All modern Airbus or Boeing planes are mostly flown with autopilot. The human component is still involved primarily for the "what if it breaks" case where the software isn't there today. A computer would likely have never considered putting a plane into the Hudson river, but that pilot saved a lot of people b…

There's also automated take off. Fighter pilots taking off carriers have to grab a couple of handlebars in the cockpit, whose purpose is only that the pilot doesn't instinctively intervene during take off.

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

#186

Post by manmal »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #48
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…

One of my friends is a train engineer. I can tell you that it's ABSURD how little automation is used in many train systems, and it's definitely not because of a lack of technology. To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly. Literally all of that can and should be done automatica…

I would not want to ride a train where a memorization error can lead to a crash.

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

#187

Post by cr0sh »

bpicolo wrote: post #6

> unveiled a new concept car, the Concept-i Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released. They do look fancy and futuristic.

> Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually released.

Not many are, but some are occasionally. I personally own one of the few existing Isuzu VehiCROSS vehicles. It started out as a concept car in the 1990s, then went into production virtually unchanged (only a tad under 6000 were ever made).

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

#188

Post by nihonde »

Animats wrote: post #173

Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there. It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo has l…

Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.

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

#189

Post by euyyn »

ghaff wrote: post #149
throwawayjava wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety,…

>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even th…

Getting a 50% discount on taxi rides would make me never consider any other option when I need a taxi.

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

#190

Post by Theodores »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #48
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…

One of my friends is a train engineer. I can tell you that it's ABSURD how little automation is used in many train systems, and it's definitely not because of a lack of technology. To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly. Literally all of that can and should be done automatica…

In Japan it works the same way, although, as everywhere outside of the USA, automation is coming/inevitable.

The white glove pointing is all about being on time, it is a discipline and hitting those exactly on time arrival-departures comes down to train drivers knowing what speed they are doing without looking at instruments, which are covered during training.

Maybe the Danes have their own variation of this obsessive stop-watch training. A system that works efficiently does not have to be computerised, fantastic teamwork and dedicated professionalism can suffice.

In other endeavours, we still have not fully automated coffee, instead of a perfectly adequate beverage from a machine some prefer a human operator to operate the machine as if it was some rocket-surgery skill/craft. I don't think train operation is like that, a faux professionalism, maybe programming is nearer the mark, some programmers use a text editor which is ridiculous when they could use an IDE. Furthermore some programmers roll their own code rather than just re-use some existing module.

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