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”

#321

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #301

vertex-four wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a quick google, noticing that other cars are pulling in/slowing down usually works if they can't see the emergency vehicle. Still, it's not "perfect", but then Hearing drivers are far from perfect either, and there's plenty of failsafes before an accident happens.

Fire trucks and ambulances I've seen when driving against traffic lights/flow of traffic always slow and stop to make sure that there will not be an accident even if they have the right of way - they don't drive like police in pursuit on TV. I'm sure there are exceptions but the general case is the emergency vehicles are planning for other traffic to not yield until it is clear the other traffic is yielding.

I'm sure there are exceptions but the general case is the emergency vehicles are planning for other traffic to not yield until it is clear the other traffic is yielding.

Yes, if the driver is well trained. When I was firefighting and instructing drivers, we always emphasized that while the red light and siren gave you the right of way:

a. they don't absolve you of liability for a crash (at least under NC law)

and

b. if you get in a crash on the way to the scene, you're not doing anybody any good, PLUS you've now created another incident requiring another emergency response, PLUS another company (probably coming from further away) has to respond to the original call.

I can't speak for police, but firefighters are actually, in my experience, taught to be pretty conservative when it comes to running red lights, proceeding against traffic on one way streets, and other similar scenarios.

We also always used to emphasize "it does no good to get halfway there, real fast".

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

#322

Post by DoubleCribble » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #317

DoubleCribble wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I applaud your synesthesia! Those of us with more common auditory processing are unable to see sound. :(

si·ren (sīrən)noun 1.a device that makes a loud prolonged sound as a signal or warning.

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

#323

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

1_2__4 wrote: post #266

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 s…

[deleted]

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

#324

Post by jdietrich » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:21 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…

Telling which direction a siren is coming from is really, really easy. You can do it with three electret microphones and a $1 ARM chip. A simple TDOA multilateration algorithm will do a far better job of it than a human, even in complex reverberant environments.

Reliably understanding speech is effectively strong AI. Humans don't speak very clearly, but we're spectacularly good at inferring meaning from context. Accurate transcripts of colloquial speech are often completely incomprehensible, because a vast amount of information is conveyed through context. When we're listening to someone speak, we're decoding the phonemes into symbols, but we're also constructing a model of the speaker's mind and predicting what they mean to say.

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

#325

Post by qyv » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:21 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…

Isn't that kind of the point though? Yes, computers can hear better than humans, but they fail miserably at understanding the meaning of what they are hearing and responding with the appropriate actions. This is exactly the same issue that is/will be faced with self driving/driverless cars.

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

#326

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by LrnByTeach » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

sol_remmy wrote: post #271

kpil wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally agree ..

> Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars.

Just to expand on your point, today's 'self driving car' technology we may equal to where 'voice recognition technology' was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, there is no incentive for industry to invest say $100 Billion in 'voice recognition technology', the benefits did not warrant such a huge investment. Where as'self driving car' technology there is potential to reap benefits that is why industry today investing $100 Billion ( all combined investments from all players )

> 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.

The huge economic value the can be created with perfected 'self driving car' is in the order of hundreds of Billions of dollars per year world wide combined . Here is an example scenario

In 2025 'self driving Electric Autonomous fleet' vehicles by Uber, Googles of the world offer 'miles plan' ( like our 2005 mobile monthly plan N minutes/month ) that is like 1000 miles per month you can hail any time for a monthly price of $300/month . This is huge economic value for at least 50% of USA drivers and people will embrace it.

Typical USA drivers total cost of ownership of CAR today is in the range of $400 to $600 per month ( CAR price + Repairs costs + car Insurance + gasoline cost) . This is with out counting 1.5 hours/day you have pay attention to drive, the time that can be used for other thing with autonomous fleet

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

#328

Post by qyv » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #232

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…

For a self driving car, it's sufficient if its understanding of weird situations is limited to detecting "yep, I'm in a weird situation, I'm going to stop now and wait for a remote human to take control". The situations you describe are rare - I've once had a diplomatic event that required weird rerouting and twice had cases where traffic was regulated by hand signals due to some crash on the road, but that means jus…

The exceptional cases can often be the most important, especially when you are talking about moving humans from place to place. I wonder how a self-driving car would react to something like driving in a hurricane?

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

#329

Post by jotjotzzz » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

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…

Agreed. I would think audio recognition is not comparable to driving, since the scope of recognizing all voices, accents, languages is vastly different than the set of rules for driving and the complexity of the road.

Realistically speaking, even if Tesla or any other manufacturing company do get to that level of a "super advance Einstein-genius" self-driving car it will still be: "not even close" if it's riding alongside the highway with 18-year old Billy-bob speedster with a penchant for cutting lanes and living dangerously. Most car accidents are due to human error.

If all cars on the highway are self-driving cars, with the ability to learn and communicate with each other through mesh-network or what-not, with predictive capacity -- it will be a lot better than any driving human that can only see what's in front of them. We just need to get to that level where most cars on the highway are smart self-driving capable cars and we can build on top of that. No one should be relying on self-driving cars to do everything at this point in the game because we're not there yet.

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

#330

Post by majewsky » Mon, Aug 28, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #234

majewsky wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but it could cost 100's of millions of dollars to support that. You might need to buy new train engines. You might need to add more signalling, or upgrade existing signalling. You might need to build bridges over/tunnel under the tracks to avoid crossings with roads. Your staff need to be retrained or you need to bring in new people to support the new system. All of that work to support a small rail line? It m…

1. There are plenty existing train systems where large trains are formed by coupling together multiple small trains that all have their own engines. That way, train lengths can be varied to optimize for demand. This wouldn't be happening if it were prohibitively expensive.

2. Why would you need to avoid crossings with roads just because it's autonomous? Trains use signals that only turn green when the section ahead is clear of other trains or vehicles. It's not like train conductors check road crossings by sight to decide whether to drive or brake.