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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”

#311

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

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…

> 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.

They've hired other folks, too, who have real-world autonomous vehicle experience.

Google/Waymo are definitely leading the pack, but I don't think we'll see Level 5 in a production vehicle for at least five years, probably closer to 10.

I read the recent article about their test facility (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...), but 1. It's still California weather and 2. I've routinely seen worse intersections. What do you do in a rotary where you have to cut across multiple lanes of traffic to exit? If the autonomous vehicle waits for another car to give way, it will be there forever.

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

#312

Post by semi-extrinsic »

ageofwant wrote: post #179
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…

Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only need to be better than the average human driver. Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the competition?

> intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous

This is a highly disingenious use of the word autonomous. Airplane "autopilots" are given a set of waypoints and will fly a straight line between those. That's been possible with cars since (at least) the 1960s too; today it's easy enough that you could give it as an end-of-term project for a bunch of robotics undergrads. It's also completely useless outside of very specialized situations like the mining dump trucks you mention.

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

#313

Post by stevenwoo »

Robotbeat wrote: post #71
_m8fo wrote: post #14

Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI. If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely said AI could also do anything else, no? EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of "full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B regardless of the c…

Not fully intelligent. More like animal intelligence, and a subset of that. No off-roading (which animals have no problem with).

I have to account for offroading animals while I drive/bike because deer love to sit on the edge of a road, and inexplicably leap in front of me at the last second or if I see some crossing the road ahead, know I have to slow down just in case it has some deer in the pack behind it that are following or the deer changes its mind because it doesn't want me to be in between it and it's herd to go back where they came from. This can involve scaling what appears to be a ten foot almost vertical wall of rock. Fawns will often wait until you get right next to them before moving because their defense mechanism is sitting still and hoping to not get noticed. So automated cars need to know what deer look like and how they behave since they are so common. Very occassionally I've had to avoid mountain lions and bobcats but based on road kill I've seen most people just drive over bobcats.

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

#314

Post by uep »

alex_anglin wrote: post #258
49para wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... They might do better with hardware than software ...

Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.

I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments, and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti code?

To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them.

Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.

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

#315

Post by mandevil »

ageofwant wrote: post #179
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…

Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only need to be better than the average human driver. Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the competition?

Planes are a good argument for the opposite.

Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial flight, why?

Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is always ready to intervene right this second, not in three minutes after they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.)

So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human free driving?

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

#316

Post by jstanley »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #209
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…

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…

> Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context.

That's not the only reason audio recognition is hard. If it were, audio recognition would be exactly as hard as interpreting written text.

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

#317

Post by jstanley »

DoubleCribble wrote: post #296
pg314 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There seems to be some limited automotive technology available that would convert sirens to visual signals, akin to doorbell or telephone strobes. But the more interesting adaptive technology seems to be a re-wiring of the brain. [0] Deprived of auditory input and with a heightened reliance on visual cues, the autonomous driving version might be something like Lidar + other driver facial recognition. [0] https://www.…

> There seems to be some limited automotive technology available that would convert sirens to visual signals

Yes, I've noticed this too. Sometimes you can almost see blue and red flashing lights on top of a police car.

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

#318

Post by semi-extrinsic »

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, for one, think the hydrogen instead of EV gamble will pay off big time. Especially in Japan where they just can't produce enough electricity to go full EV, what with shutting down most of their nuclear plants. H2 is a much more realistic zero emission energy carrier for them.

Also, as electricity demand and price goes up, and gas demand and price goes down, oil companies will quickly pivot to producing H2 by steam methane reforming with carbon capture and storage, to continue the returns on their billions of dollars of investments.

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

#319

Post by brudgers »

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.

The scenario in which insurance companies drive adoption of self driving cars depends upon insurance companies accepting the risk of system failure due to manufacturing defects or limitations that generate the wrong response in particular conditions.

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

#320

Post by jessriedel »

leereeves wrote: post #124
jessriedel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google voice dictation to transcribe emails and text messages on my phone constantly. Not like "I tried it for a week and then went back". I have been using it daily for months. It's now vastly faster than typing it in by hand on a phone, and even the per-word error rate is actually better than mobile typing.

That's not to say that voice dictation is good enough to trust your life to (as in autonomous driving), just that mobile typing is even worse.

The interesting distinction isn't between life-dependent and non-life-dependent, it's between worse-than-human and better-than-human. I wouldn't "trust my life" to never making a typing error, and yet I trust my life to the driving my fingers do...and statistically, I have a small but real chance of death.
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