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Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

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Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#101

Post by revelation »

1_2__4 wrote: post #38
antirez wrote: post #4

I don't know what to believe. A few days ago I spent some time checking publicly available data and the result is that the current state of art is extremely far from an autonomous car that, could like used to drive a taxi in a busy city like Rome. Not far as "still some effort needed" but potentially "not clear when this could be available" far. Now there are those claims made by multiple companies... Go figure.

Maybe stop believing what companies say and start looking for third-party evidence that they're telling the truth

That gets boring fast, if you go by the evidence the only player in the self-driving space is Google. Ironically they are the most restrained in public statements while there is a long list of pretenders announcing they'll ship in 2020 and already discussing far-fetched (entirely) philosophical scenarios, like the whole abortion of an discussion we had on "should the car hit pedestrians or save its driver".

The whole conversation is unfortunately poisoned by endless wishful thinking instead of discussing hard evidence. I mean there is still a large proportion of people on here who think Tesla will somehow leapfrog Google because they have all those cars out there streaming the raw video data from their umpteen cameras back to Tesla HQ, utilizing an imaginary mobile communications standard that leapfrogs LTE by two orders of magnitude that they invented alongside their LIDAR-less L5 autonomous car software in record time.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#102

Post by cropsieboss »

antirez wrote: post #4

I don't know what to believe. A few days ago I spent some time checking publicly available data and the result is that the current state of art is extremely far from an autonomous car that, could like used to drive a taxi in a busy city like Rome. Not far as "still some effort needed" but potentially "not clear when this could be available" far. Now there are those claims made by multiple companies... Go figure.

The thing is, for car driving you need combinatorial search combined with a good model (statistical) of the world. Research I've seen does not incorporate any kind of meaningful search.

Company that has all the roads and surroundings scanned and knows exactly where the car is at all times is at a huge advantage.

Partially observed world gets your head hurting. Not modelling other cars practically makes everything useless.

If you can't hallucinate everything around you as close as possible, the problem gets very very difficult.

I'm pretty sure there are companies close to solving the problem, as they have more data and some also know practically every road in the modern world.

Modelling and tracking other cars is a bigger issue, including pedestrians.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#103

Post by prostoalex »

andys627 wrote: post #11

>Electric self-driving cars will save millions of lives and significantly accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, but only when they’re deployed in large numbers. Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.

> Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.

And yet https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/cities-suburbs-ho...

"Despite the hype around “micro-apartments” and other innovations intended to cram more people into less room, many Americans still want space. They want to live in detached suburban homes, or in an apartment with enough square footage and access to outdoor space that it feels like one. Two-thirds of people born since 1997, including those who live in cities, want to live in single-family suburban homes, according to a 2015 survey, but the costs make this aspiration prohibitively expensive in most urban centers."

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#104

Post by giarc »

aerovistae wrote: post #63

While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up. Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation: You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there'…

MIT (and I assume others) have collected data on these types of scenarios. For example, swerve and kill a bunch of people, or stay the course and kill a mom and baby?

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#105

Post by pkulak »

Nope, I don't believe it for a second. There's no way these can run in the rain, or maybe even after dusk, and absolutely not off of extremely well researched and hand-picked routes. I'm so sick of companies trying to pretend like they've figured out level-5 self driving.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#106

Post by xur17 »

Fricken wrote: post #74
ryanmarsh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they're pretty close. Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty. I'd like to know more, do you have a source for these claims?

It's a prediction, I can't provide a source for events that haven't occurred. But Reuters reported they intend to put 'thousands' of autonomous Bolts on the road in 2018: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-autonomous-exclusive/e... Cruise has released some impressive demos on their YouTube page, of vehicle driving around downtown SF: https://youtu.be/KSRPmng1cmA Cruise reported to the California DMV that they aver…

> Cruise reported to the California DMV that they averaged on unplanned disengagement every 180 miles through 2016

Isn't this disengagement rate several orders of magnitude too high to support fully autonomous vehicles?

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#107

Post by irq11 »

sbov wrote: post #83
aerovistae wrote: post #63

While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up. Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation: You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there'…

None of these contrived scenarios compares to the rate at which humans simply fail to stop when they should have stopped. I don't know anyone who got into or was rescued from an accident by pulling one of these maneuvers. I know plenty of people who got into accidents because someone (them or someone else) failed to stop when they should have stopped. Considering humans can barely stop when they should, I don't give…

As long as other cars (or humans, or animals...) are on the road, robot cars will face these scenarios.

The OP's scenario is contrived to make a clear example, but it happens regularly when you're driving: you're forced to make a choice between acting and possibly hitting something, or doing nothing and being hit.

We don't need self driving cars to solve the 80% case of preventing human drivers from hitting things. We need radar and auto-braking, which already exists. Full autonomy requires solving the harder problems.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#108

Post by Fricken »

eco wrote: post #96
Fricken wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they're pretty close. Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty. GM has consistently been underestimated by the public, but they've played their cards very well. It's in no small part due to the drive and leadership of Kyle Vogt, who is on his way to the big leagues to join the ranks of Musk, Bezos, and Jobs and those guys.

Is there anywhere that allows autonomous cars to be tested on real roads without a fallback human driver?

Arizona. Their weather and regulatory climate has Waymo, Cruise, and Uber all testing there. I believe Michigan and Florida are also willing to permit fully autonomous cars on their roads, but most of the action is in and around Phoenix.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#109

Post by akgerber »

andys627 wrote: post #11

>Electric self-driving cars will save millions of lives and significantly accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, but only when they’re deployed in large numbers. Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.

Self driving cars can enable both urbanism and sprawl, depending on their deployment— if the existence of self-driving vehicle fleets at a per-mile price competitive with a personal car enables the collapse of personal car ownership in cities, that will open up a lot of possibilities for urban infill.

It will make the politics of building mid-rise housing without extensive, expensive underground parking space a lot more politically palatable in American cities. The same is true of replacing parking with pedestrian and bike infrastructure. And that says nothing about the safety benefits that will make cycling and walking a lot more pleasant and accessible in a lot of the US. (There are no technical barriers to building mid-rise urban housing without parking and replacing parking with high-quality pedestrian and bike infrastructure in the US today, but the politics are very difficult as drivers treat free/cheap access to city-owned street space as a right)

Plus, urbanites paying the marginal per-mile cost of a robotaxi trip, as opposed to buying a car as a huge sunk cost and then trying to get the maximum use from it, means that people will consider the car-versus-transit-versus-bike economics a lot more often, rather than buying a car and becoming someone who drives everywhere.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#110

Post by Animats »

So GM engineering got the hardware integrated with the vehicle and engineered it for assembly line production. That's what GM engineering does. Whether the Cruise software is good enough for self-driving without driver attention remains to be seen.

Volvo is doing well with their self-driving car, but admits the hardware cost is over $100K per car at present.

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