Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close” • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by pg314 » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

DoubleCribble wrote: post #248

speby wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio recognition may be apples and oranges to self-driving vehicles. But as it relates to autonomous driving, audio recognition (and I don't mean speech but general sounds) is something nobody has been talking about (at least publicly) as a sensor input for self-driving cars. Think about how much you rely on your hearing to drive safely and well. Sure, we use sight/depth and so forth substantially but we also rely o…

Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstruc…

Are deaf people allowed to drive? How do you think they handle these situations?

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

#262

Post by xapata » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

DoubleCribble wrote: post #248

speby wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio recognition may be apples and oranges to self-driving vehicles. But as it relates to autonomous driving, audio recognition (and I don't mean speech but general sounds) is something nobody has been talking about (at least publicly) as a sensor input for self-driving cars. Think about how much you rely on your hearing to drive safely and well. Sure, we use sight/depth and so forth substantially but we also rely o…

Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstruc…

Microphones cost much h less than LIDAR.

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

#263

Post by ilaksh » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:35 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #115

Does anyone have concrete evidence on an over-under date for something commercial, e.g., availability of self-driving (or at least a self-delivering) taxi? The most specific hint at a number I've seen recently was in the neighborhood of 2022, which comes from a recent Morgan Stanley report on Waymo: "The analysts believe Waymo can get to an operating profit by 2022 and reach 8% margins by 2030." https://www.forbes.co…

There is actually no reason to predict this to be years away except for like just future shock or something. Which is the big thing holding it back is just general disbelief.

Waymo is actually testing for real in Arizona with selected people from the public.

Yes, they include an employee in the car to monitor or take over if necessary. But from the numbers I saw they reported to the DMV like a year ago, with Waymo's cars that happens surprisingly little. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b... Like very, very little. 635,868 miles and 124 reportable disengages. As of last year. Significantly improved now. In the rare case of a problem they can send a human to help.

If they had legal clearance or a waiver or something, they could TODAY just take some routes and times that had little traffic and not include the test/backup employee. Again, the number of times they report the driver needs to take over now is minuscule. They could then start charging for the rides. Then that would be a commercial deployment.

For them to make that widely available, at first for selected low traffic areas and times to reduce the risk of any incident or needing to send a human driver, is just a matter of scaling up their fleet and the legal issues.

Tesla is pushing very hard to the point of being unsafe to get their autopilot to actually work in as many circumstances as possible. They literally have been selling self-driving cars. The cars are collecting massive amounts of real-world data. They have hired many genius AI experts. Unless there are too many crashes or the company goes down in flames (which is possible considering how aggressively they are testing and releasing software even with issues), they will push to decrease the amount of driving the human has to do down to close to 0 as soon as is possible. Musk will try as hard as he can to get 75% to 100% there before the end of the year, because that is literally what he has promised. By the end of next year his actual conservative expectation is to be more than 80%.

As far as operating profit who knows, but there is no way that we will be waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed, at least in somewhat limited routes and times.

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

#264

Post by icantdrive55 » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:36 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #221

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 presumably treats reliability differently. When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.

I've noticed when a Toyota does pretty much anything, and it's in the customer's hands; it just does the job.

They learned long ago a satisfied customer is the best advertising. Yes, they still need to advertise, like all companies. The average consumer still cares about cup holders, over a reliable engine, or powertrain.

I have a weird feeling they are farther along with fully autonomous driving than they claim.

They made their reputation on reliability. They didn't come out in the 80's and say our vechicles will drive you 200,000 miles with not too many garage visits.

Let the other companies produce the first round, and take all the heat for mishaps. Then, if they haven't outlawed them, just sell the customer the vehicle that drives itself flawlessly.

They don't need money to promote their stock. They don't need to finance their research. Why claim they are close to AI driving until the product is perfect?

They could wait a few years, and decimate all competition with a superior product.

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

#265

Post by ilaksh » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

flunhat wrote: post #224

cr0sh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mat…

Waymo's self driving tech is definitely not anywhere near level 5 capability (if that were true, they'd rule the world right now and we'd all be using their tech). From Waymo's Wikipedia article: >As of 28 August 2014, according to Computer World Google's self-driving cars were in fact unable to use about 99% of US roads.[57] As of the same date, the latest prototype had not been tested in heavy rain or snow due to s…

You know 2014 was three years ago right?

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

#266

Post by 1_2__4 » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

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…

Every time this gets brought up here people scoff. Nobody seems to be willing to notice that tech companies have for quite a while now been misrepresenting the pace of innovation in areas that not-coincidentally are attempts at diversifying revenue streams by hitting new tech home runs. See also: Glass, any of the other nonsense coming out of Google X (Loon? Cyber contacts?), drone delivery, digital assistants, and so forth. Not to say cool stuff isn't happening in all these fields but we are not just a few short years away from the tech being viable.

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

#267

Post by Animats » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:39 PM UTC

strebler wrote: post #75

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…

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…

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 machine BOTH have to miss it.

That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. The one that would happily run into obstacles protruding into a lane.[1][2][3] There are two big flaws with that approach. First, if it's good enough that people can tune out, they will tune out. Second, if the driver waits until the self-driving system has clearly made a mistake before taking over, they will be slower at reacting than if they were driving, and may be too late. See especially [3].

Volvo's CEO takes the position that if one of their cars crashes in self-driving mode, it's Volvo's fault. Urmson, while at Google, pointed out the first problem coming up even with their test drivers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRkSMCDX3o [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c

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

#268

Post by qwdqwd » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #253

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 can't help but think about speech recognition 20 years ago. Many of the hot software packages claimed something like 96% accuracy, and that sounded great on paper. People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just around the corner, yet here we are in 2017, and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely becoming usable (but still frustratingly lacking in many situations). Computer speech recognition now has a gre…

> Computer speech recognition now has a greater accuracy than human speech recognition

Bollocks. I'm frequently misunderstood by telephone speech menus and never by humans on the phone.

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

#269

Post by Animats » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #89

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…

Even better than speech recognition, handwriting recognition. Hello, Apple Newton, may you rest in peace. I'm not convinced we'll have handwriting recognition within my lifetime, and if we do I imagine that shortly after I'll go looking for Sarah Connor :)

Automated reading of checks and of envelopes is working very well. Automated envelope reading is now so good that the USPS only has one center in the US where humans look at images of envelopes. They just look at the hard cases, and if they show up there, they're really hard.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

DoubleCribble wrote: post #248

speby wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio recognition may be apples and oranges to self-driving vehicles. But as it relates to autonomous driving, audio recognition (and I don't mean speech but general sounds) is something nobody has been talking about (at least publicly) as a sensor input for self-driving cars. Think about how much you rely on your hearing to drive safely and well. Sure, we use sight/depth and so forth substantially but we also rely o…

Curious, isn't it? Humans rely on auditory information to enhance situational awareness so you'd think that would factor into the design of a machine that needs as much situational awareness as possible. For example, emergency response vehicles announce their arrival and direction often long before any visual contact is made. How will deaf autonomous cars recognize incoming emergency responders if the view is obstruc…

[deleted]