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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”

#211

Post by dsfyu404ed »

saosebastiao wrote: post #105
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

You have one. It's called eyeballs and a horn.

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

#212

Post by zzzzzzzza »

euyyn wrote: post #174
rayiner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 turn…

But you, as a human, don't need to know what happened before, to be able and drive through those conditions. You just need the immediately-available information, which is what OP defined as "no need for context" vs speech recognition.

yes but even humans are much better drivers on roads they are familiar with.

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

#213

Post by Animats »

sah2ed wrote: post #202
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…

What do you think of Austin Russell's Luminar? https://www.luminartech.com/

Their web site has no useful information. It's hard to say much about that.

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

#214

Post by tspike »

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.

Folks are glossing over this quote too easily:

> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,”

It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.

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

#215

Post by dingo_bat »

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.

To be honest, Toyota's cars and the systems in them feel rock solid. I don't get the same confidence from, say, Tesla. Have a look at YouTube videos of Tesla's cars doing scary stuff like trying to drive into the median suddenly. It's nowhere near ready for public use. If they were selling the same number of cars as Toyota, there'd be a lot more accidents happening.

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

#216

Post by weaksauce »

nihonde wrote: post #188
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 m…

Unless they have a huge cultural shift in engineering toward safety and best practices I certainly wouldn't trust them with my life. read through the Barr report on the acceleration incidents and you will see all the untrustworthy engineering going on there.

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

#217

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #203
nihonde wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. But autonomous driving is at its core a challenging software problem. No major car manufacturer outside of perhaps Tesla has a track record of shipping software at scale. They're hardware companies. Your sentiment here is like saying Samsung is great at making phones so they must be great at Mobile OS's. They're fundamentally separate things, and we…

Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes.

No Toyota is fantastic at designing, building, marketing, managing logistics, integrating credit systems etc...for cars.

Selling a Level 5 automated car is as much marketing as it is software. It could work perfectly but if nobody trusts it enough to buy, at a low enough price point, then it won't matter.

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

#218

Post by majewsky »

jbob2000 wrote: post #31
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…

There's no good reason to automate trains right now, aside for the sake of automating them. It would take a lot of cash to accomplish and it would put us exactly where we are now.

Here's a reason: If trains were automated, low-demand lines with long headway (i.e. 2 hours and more) could be serviced more frequently (with proportionally shorter trains) with about the same amount of fuel usage. A shorter headway will make the line more attractive and increase passenger numbers.

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

#219

Post by cr0sh »

clairity wrote: post #66

the hype around it is fun, but the reality is that autonomous driving is harder than anything we've done before as a species and we have a bunch of the best minds working on it already (as the article notes). rockets and electric cars are really cool, but those have largely been engineering challenges. autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage. i can't imagine we'll see true autonomous vehicles w…

> autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage.

Autonomous vehicles have been virtually out of the "basic scientific research stage" ever since Darpa's Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007.

While there is still a ton of research being done, most of it has been focused on refining existing solutions, or applying existing solutions into new problem spaces. For the most part, we know what is needed both in hardware and software to gain Level 5 capability, and for the most part we have working examples of all those functions.

What is left is refinement.

I also believe that Tesla is on the right path by using cameras for it's main sensor input (augmented by radar, and probably some LIDAR too). We already know that our road system can be navigated visually - it's inherently designed for this. In theory, radar and LIDAR shouldn't be needed at all, but just as they are useful augmentations for humans (in those areas that they are used - such as proximity detection on some vehicles), so they are also useful for self-driving systems.

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

#220

Post by munin »

Eridrus wrote: post #121
ScottBurson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gill Pratt is not "some dude" -- he's a robotics researcher with a PhD from MIT, and was a DARPA program manager [0]. [0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...

To engage with the substance of his argument a bit more, his argument is that perfection is a long way away: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfect…

Lots of people make this argument. I have a counter-argument: when a technology is convenient or appealing enough, people will overlook even very obvious safety/health problems. Consider texting while driving, drinking, smoking/vaping, even driving itself. Cognitively, we know that there are a bunch of things we do that are dangerous, but we do them anyway out of habit or convenience. The argument that assumes we demand "zero tolerance" seems to assume that every person is a run-5k-a-day, celery eating, take-the-bus, machine. That's far from the case. We do tons of things knowing they're bad and risky already.

I think it's far more likely that there would be a three step process for this technology to be adopted: first it's early adopters and everyone else is like "whoa that's too far" (I think this has already happened), then people start to uneasily use it, and when it's good enough they realize "oh holy crap, the machine can drive while I watch Netflix! this is awesome" and then they'll use it constantly. Soon, it just blends into the background. Maybe it isn't 100% safe, but what is?

I don't think you'll get the truth out of focus groups, either. Try to hold a focus group on self driving car adoption and 99% of the people will tell you "only when it's perfect." Probably if you ask the same focus group if they text/eat/put on makeup and drive, 99% of them would tell you "absolutely not" when I'm sure that 100% of them do. I think that once a somewhat good enough assist gets into peoples hands, it won't stop.

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