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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”

#391

Post by taneq »

qyv wrote: post #332
euyyn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you, as a human, don't need to know what happened before, to be able and drive through those conditions. You just need the immediately-available information, which is what OP defined as "no need for context" vs speech recognition.

How does a self driving car differentiate between a police officer flagging you down and a carjacker? Humans can make this judgement because we have a context for each of those situations based on our understanding of how the world works outside of just operating a vehicle safely.

To be fair, humans can't do this either, or there wouldn't be such a thing as carjackers.

One of the biggest challenges that automated systems face is that the acceptable failure rate for them is far below the acceptable failure rate for humans in the same role. To err is human...

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

#392

Post by unityByFreedom »

strebler wrote: post #336
Animats wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tesla took the opposite approach of what I described (the Subaru approach). Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control and the human has to detect and take over when the machine makes a mistake. That is known to be a very problematic strategy, it's easy for the human to get distracted. What Subaru has done is to leave the human in control, the machine only steps in when it sees a problem. It's totally dif…

> Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control

That's not really accurate. Tesla says the driver is ultimately responsible. That holds unless a court determines otherwise. The same is true for Toyota/Subaru. They're all SAE level 2 systems.

The opposite approach from this would be Waymo/Volvo who intend to take responsibility for decisions made by their vehicles. Those are SAE level 4 or 5 systems.

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

#393

Post by chrismealy »

stevenwoo wrote: post #303
Bahamut wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US death rate is lower than most countries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

The general trend from that data appears that the higher the standard of living, the higher the safety is per driving mile and the US is where one would expect in such a list, better than third world countries, worse than Europe.

Canada has 40% fewer road deaths by population. I don't think they're that much richer or smarter than Americans. Complacency is killing people.

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

#394

Post by mjevans »

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.

I really don't want those on in stop and go rush-hour traffic. They're very likely to cause someone /behind/ the automated car to have an accident. (Yeah yeah, following distances; trying building enough capacity for everyone to do the proper following speed and keep distance.)

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

#395

Post by jpatokal »

Robotbeat wrote: post #295
ghaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers. Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even th…

1) Now the taxi can operate day and night without substantial breaks. That reduces per-passenger-mile amortization costs by at least a factor of 2. 2) Especially since amortization cost is also reduced, you might as well electrify the vehicle (this requires some sort of robot arm for fast charging, but I suppose you could pay someone like $0.50 per cycle to plug and unplug a bunch of vehicles in the interim). That re…

1) It's already very common for taxis to operate two shifts per day with two drivers. Also, there's less demand in the middle of the night than there is at peak hours.

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

#396

Post by unityByFreedom »

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 wrote: post #293
Animats wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately you can't augment a level 5 self-driving car with human resources in an analogous way.

Well, we use humans to learn from mistakes in both cases and improve the technology.

The big difference is a mistake in a car is more likely to cause injury than a misdelivered letter.

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

#397

Post by foolfoolz »

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…

who cares if toyota doesn't make battery electric cars in mass yet? what works best in america today is hybrids, and they were ahead of the game there. probably the best decision they made was to go all in on hybrid before battery-only. they know range is super important and the mirai can go farther than almost any electric car.

i really dont see autonomous driving as much of a race when the "race" is going to take 20-30 years to complete. cycles that long give everyone a chance to catch up and leapfrog each other

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

#398

Post by stevenwoo »

chrismealy wrote: post #393
stevenwoo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general trend from that data appears that the higher the standard of living, the higher the safety is per driving mile and the US is where one would expect in such a list, better than third world countries, worse than Europe.

Canada has 40% fewer road deaths by population. I don't think they're that much richer or smarter than Americans. Complacency is killing people.

Good point. Probably no single simple correlation will do - higher fuel prices points to the one thing that Western Europe and Canada share off the top of my head compared to the USA. (That and nationalized healthcare. :) )

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

#399

Post by linkregister »

nihonde wrote: post #370
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change "Toyota" for "1982 IBM" and you'll see the mistake of thinking this is a hardware problem.

And yet the clear winner in the PC market is Apple, an incumbent that always did both hardware and software.

Is that clear?

For desktops, Apple's sales barely register.

Servers? Nope.

Laptops? Sure. But Chromebooks have outsold them.

The only realm that Apple dominates is smartphones. They're great. I enjoy my iPhone. It also happens that iPhone sales are enough to be the biggest publicly-traded company in the world.

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

throwawayjava wrote: post #133
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…

The economics couldn't be more different. Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking. Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi. Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains. We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety,…

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