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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”

#351

Post by 0xbear »

hnaccy wrote: post #194
0xbear wrote: post #136

First step should be a car with driver assistance so sophisticated, a human driver can't crash it. Seems like a much more tractable problem, and one I personally would pay quite a bit of money for in a few years, when my son is old enough to drive.

Probably more efficient to just have another kid.

For you maybe. Redundancy in my case comes at a price: kids are about $300k+ a pop nowadays between ages 0 and 18, assuming upper middle class lifestyle. More if you pay for college. That being the case, I'd be willing to pay double the price for a car that verifiably makes it darn near impossible for the driver to kill himself.

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

#352

Post by dboreham »

strebler wrote: post #172
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.

This has already started - look up the discount some insurers give to owners of Subarus that are equipped with EyeSight. The numbers show their collision avoidance is making roads safer. Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.

I recently bought a Subaru, and I agree. However, this is in no way at all related to "self driving cars" (which don't actually exist and therefore nobody knows how the insurance companies and general public will react to the liability/safety/skin-in-the-game issues).

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

#353

Post by dboreham »

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…

Seriously?

>Computer speech recognition now has a greater accuracy than human speech recognition, but the types of use cases for talking to a computer are much less sensitive to error. Short snippets and phrases that are designed to get something done right now.

You just said that speech recognition doesn't work in general. In general is exactly where self-driving has to work. If we just needed self-driving trains, we'd have them already*

*We do have them, but strangely there isn't much demand since human train drivers appear to do an ok job most of the time.

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

#354

Post by cmiles74 »

vel0city wrote: post #338
rayiner wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These situations aren't rare at all. Just in the last few months, I've had: change in left-turn traffic pattern leaving my office onto a major road; humans guiding traffic on 2-3 separate occasions (very common around July 4th); cones dramatically changing lane patterns in construction zones; two occasions of cops blocking off a road with their cars to let a motorcade pass. And this is just me driving ( i.e. my car i…

I imagine traffic in D.C. is incredibly atypical compared to most US cities. Issues common to drivers in D.C. are probably very rare to most drivers in the US, including those in other major metropolitan areas.

I live in New England and the poster's description of DC traffic sounds like what I see all the time, from cities like Boston or even small towns like East Longmeadow.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/05/east_longmead...

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

#355

Post by ingenieroariel »

Animats wrote: post #347
Swizec wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. I think OP was talking about "crash avoidance" systems. Not systems that claim to drive the car but not really. You 're always driving, the car is just silently observing. If the car sees you're about to crash, it steps in and takes over. The opposite of Tesla's approach where you play the role of observer taking…

There are many automotive "auto-brake" systems, usually controlled by a radar. Those are useful. They're usually programmed to act only when a collision is inevitable. They prevent some slow-speed collisions, and reduce the damage in some faster ones. What they don't do is take over steering. A last-second takeover of steering would make things worse some of the time.

Can you elaborate?

Assuming for example the car is fitted with solid state lidar on the four corners and ESR on the four sides or even LIDAR.

What are your thoughts on crash prevention if the car has the same hardware as a a Waymo car?

(edit: to clarify, would you consider autosteering at the last minute safer than a human driver in that scenario?)

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

#356

Post by dboreham »

wstrange wrote: post #335
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a few more very common examples of humans using context: A human will spot a person wearing headphones and recognize that person has a low situational awareness. The computer doesn't come close to even having the optical resolution to do that if the AI was perfect - remember human vision is 570+ megapixels, even a 4K video stream is literally two orders of magnitude lower. [Now think about the fact that if we bui…

The computer could just assume the worst case: That all people are classified as drunk children wearing headphones with low situational awareness.

If the self-driving proponents were to say that human drivers would be banned, and all vehicles would therefore be self-driving I'd have more respect for their arguments. That said, you still need to account for things like pedestrians and snow. If we're talking about "self-driving on the I-5 when it isn't raining and there are no human drivers permitted" then yes I think we're probably close..

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

#357

Post by dboreham »

rayiner wrote: post #238
PeterisP wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These situations aren't rare at all. Just in the last few months, I've had: change in left-turn traffic pattern leaving my office onto a major road; humans guiding traffic on 2-3 separate occasions (very common around July 4th); cones dramatically changing lane patterns in construction zones; two occasions of cops blocking off a road with their cars to let a motorcade pass. And this is just me driving ( i.e. my car i…

Your mention of humans guiding traffic reminds me of advice from my father many years ago: never assume that a human giving you direction when you're driving is giving you good information. Always evaluate whether what they're conveying to you may be either misunderstood (e.g. what does "wave" mean??) or just plain false. Hard for a human to do.

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

#358

Post by MarkMc »

Pratt says, "Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine"

Now imagine an autonomous car that had an accident rate one fifth the rate of human drivers. Would society really decide not to allow such a car on the road?

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

#359

Post by ZeroGravitas »

rsync wrote: post #280
gordon_freeman wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also have the "e-power" platform, of which the Note version is supposed to be selling well, and a Juke version has been shown in concept form.

This is, basically, the Leaf setup but with a much smaller battery and a range extending generator. Currently you can't even plug it in, but it does give higher mpg and better driving experience around urban areas compared with an ICE car.

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

#360

Post by leereeves »

jessriedel wrote: post #320
leereeves wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, if the car isn't going to drive significantly better than a human, I'd rather drive myself. I prefer to be responsible for my own safety.
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