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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”

#271

Post by sol_remmy »

kpil wrote: post #233
kajecounterhack wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language…

I think that audio recognition is an order of magnitude less complicated than fully autonomous driving. The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had t…

Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested.

That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.

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

#272

Post by pg314 »

dperfect wrote: post #168
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 fel…

> 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.

In the vast majority of the cases, that sign will have been seen by another autonomous car on a sunny day before it had graffiti, and stored in the map database. You should be comparing a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles learning from each other versus an individual human.

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

#273

Post by nradov »

euyyn wrote: post #185
SEJeff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. The handlebars aren't to prevent instinctive intervention, but rather to guard against accidentally bumping the controls during high acceleration. At that point the airplane is physically attached to the catapult; the autopilot isn't doing anything. As soon as the aircraft leaves the catapult the pilot takes the controls again.

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

#274

Post by Retric »

tspike wrote: post #214
jason_pomerleau wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems.

In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets.

A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft.

Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.

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

#275

Post by Animats »

nradov wrote: post #134
SEJeff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Military UAVs have a high crash rate. There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.

That aircraft was mostly landed by the Airbus stability control system. The pilot's job was to make the decision to land it there. Read the book "Fly by Wire", by William Langewiesche.

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

#276

Post by dsfyu404ed »

tspike wrote: post #214
jason_pomerleau wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>the illusion of control.

No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.

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

#277

Post by Skunkleton »

Animats wrote: post #267
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…

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 protru…

Perhaps a portion of Tesla's problem was with marketing? Autopilot gives very different cues than something like LKAS (lane keep assist).

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

#278

Post by cmurf »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #90
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 have been automated to some degree for 100 years. Fully automating a plane at the equivalent of Level 5 is almost a trivial problem compared to doing so with cars. The reason planes aren't automated is mostly social, not technical. Whereas with cars it's decidedly both.

Planes aren't automated mostly for technical and infrastructural reasons, the exact opposite of what you stated. The social worry of pilotless airplanes inhibits the massive investment that would be required to solve the technical and infrastructure limitations of the existing system.

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

#279

Post by cmurf »

cryptoz wrote: post #25
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…

30,000 people in the USA alone are killed each year because of human driving error. Humans are not getting any better at driving. Car safety mechanisms have reduced road death rates significantly in the last 50 years, but still - 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone due to human driver error. Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.

About the same number of people die of influenza each year. We've been dying in these numbers for a long time, and it really doesn't matter at a macro scale. It's fine to try and do better, there are some positives for trying, but this is more of a want, not a need.

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

#280

Post by rsync »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #230
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…

I just don't understand Toyota's product strategy here. They are like Apple in car manufacturing (not comparing in design but in reliability and sheer quantity of products). So I'd assume they'd understood the demand for the electric cars for some time now and would have come up with electric cars which have great reliability and are cheap. But all they have done is introduced Mirai which only sells 100 a month and a…

I think an even bigger conundrum is Nissan ...

They produced and delivered a popular, well received electric car and have been selling them since 2010.

I assumed we would, after a few years, see electric Jukes and 350z and an Infiniti model. Maybe a electric GT-R as a "halo" model. Something ? Anything ?

Instead, seven years went by and they have managed to (almost) release a second-generation Leaf.

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