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Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#211

Post by galdosdi »

inverse_pi wrote: post #149
fabian2k wrote: post #19

> Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona There can certainly be arguments about whether the kind of miles driven are equivalent…

In science, when there's a two orders of magnitude difference, it's more indicative of distribution mismatch between the test sets. The logarithmic property of the learning curve suggests that, unless one approach is a completely random walk, two learning algorithms after a period of training must converge to their maximum capacity. As a scientist, I'm refused to be clouded by my prior judgement of the companies behi…

This supports my thesis waymo is building a self driving car but uber is only building a pretend self driving car (to fleece investors, who realize uber will go bankrupt if snd when anyoneother than uber achieves total success with self driving)

Google is playing chess, uber is playing checkers. Dont be fooled just because the board looks the same.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#212

Post by swiley »

ojbyrne wrote: post #71
rjvir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how so many techies initially had the knee-jerk reaction of "well, despite this accident, I bet these Uber autonomous cars are still safer than humans". It seems like all information available to us suggests the polar opposite.

After nearly getting hit by a car while on a crosswalk in broad daylight today, I don't think "polar opposite" is correct. I actually made eye contact with the driver, and expected her to slow down (I was right in the middle of the street). Instead she sped up to get through the crosswalk ahead of me.

I don't know if that's better than what happened to me: she just screamed and threw her hands up while I jumped out of the way.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#213

Post by swiley »

radlad wrote: post #125
danso wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona To be fair, Uber is not necessarily acting badly -- especially since AZ doesn't appear to care either way -- having the safety driver is ostensibly supposed to make the AV at least as safe as if it were a regular human-driven car. I hope during the investigation we find out whether Uber made it clear to its human drivers t…

As a human driver, when do you know to take control of the vehicle and start stopping? At 100 feet? 200 feet? 300 feet (a football field?) A quick Google[1] suggests the average stopping distance of a human traveling 35mph is 95 feet (including reaction time.) The promise of autonomous is 60 feet. If the human decides to stop at 60 feet, it's too late. If they stop before that, how do they know if the vehicle is work…

If you see something and the software does not. It probably doesn't provide that sort of information to the driver though. Even then the driver probably isn't paying attention.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#214

Post by acranox »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #195
foobar1962 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to post that! What are “reasonable” rules for autonomous vehicles? Should they stick to the limit literally, so only start accelerating after the increased limit sign? (There will need to be warning signs when a speed limit reduction is ahead to give the vehicle time to comply.) Would a vehicle speeding up before the sign indicate a failure or error in the system?

It's important to follow the average speed of the traffic you are in, if you keep to the speed limit while driving slower than the average your driving causes a danger on the road by causing people to drive around you and changing lanes and speeds is where accidents happen.

The slow driver isn’t creating the danger though. It’s all the drivers going over that actually create the danger you describe. If everyone just followed the laws, the danger you describe would no longer exist. Normalization if traffic violations is compounding the problem of the danger we face on the roads. So many problems could be solved and so many lives saved if people just followed the laws. The fact that everyone isn’t following the laws doesn’t need to be accepted as status quo.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#215

Post by saalweachter »

drawkbox wrote: post #170
lsaferite wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accident was ~590ft after the speed increase.

So about 6-8 seconds or so, as the car was still accelerating most likely. There is also probably a slight delay for AI based driving after speed limits change, so probably closer to 4-5 seconds later.

That actually sounds like a potential corner case - braking while still accelerating. I'd hope to all that's holy that sort of corner case comes up in your first million miles of testing and not basically in production, but it sets my debugging nose a-twitching.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#216

Post by 908087 »

chrsstrm wrote: post #144
beamatronic wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to work blockchain into there somehow, looks good otherwise

Just imagine if autonomous ride-hailing services were required to self-authenticate their firmware before each ride. On the blockchain. Which means you sit in a stationary car, by yourself, for 4+ minutes (probably being forced to watch ads) before it starts moving. But hey, BLOCKCHAIN!!!

During which time the price of "gascoin" dives 50% and your ride is abruptly ended as a result of inadequate payment. When you try to pay the difference, you're informed that the network is congested (due to people rushing to send their coins to an exchange and panic sell) and it will take 3 hours to confirm.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#217

Post by sokoloff »

acranox wrote: post #214
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to follow the average speed of the traffic you are in, if you keep to the speed limit while driving slower than the average your driving causes a danger on the road by causing people to drive around you and changing lanes and speeds is where accidents happen.

The slow driver isn’t creating the danger though. It’s all the drivers going over that actually create the danger you describe. If everyone just followed the laws, the danger you describe would no longer exist. Normalization if traffic violations is compounding the problem of the danger we face on the roads. So many problems could be solved and so many lives saved if people just followed the laws. The fact that every…

> The fact that everyone isn’t following the laws doesn’t need to be accepted as status quo.

It literally is the status quo. If I were still working on autonomous cars, I'd be much more inclined to work into the true status quo rather than imagine the status quo ought to be different and build towards that.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#218

Post by wruwew8uu9 »

hunter23 wrote: post #63

This is how I would deal with it if I was a regulator: * Revoke Uber's license to operate - While they might not be found at fault, they have shown gross negligence by having an operator that doesn't observe the road, computer vision that can't sense a pedestrian crossing several lanes even when their LIDAR manufacturer says they could, and an algorithm which encouraged the car to speed 3 mph over the limit when it w…

Yes, tests could use Boston Dynamics-type robots to simulate humans or deer etc, but the test for not killing a person crossing a highway could be simpler to begin with:

A test-road intersected by a tram-track with a motorized trolly on which various test-subjects are mounted; the car drives the road (at night under controlled lighting conditions) and the tolley drives the test-subject across the car's path at various speeds and times. The car must perform an emergency-brake, swerve or other safety move depending on the test-subject (a crash-test dummy, cardboard-box, plastic-bag, fake-bird etc).

The test result data could be fed back into the machine-learning to inform simulations for further testing in virtual environments. A company with Uber's resources can afford to build such a test-track and should have. There's a gap in the market for a company to provide such testing facilities for car makers.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#219

Post by jaclaz »

ksenzee wrote: post #23
AdrianB1 wrote: post #6

I don't understand the fuss around this topic. In my country the law is very clear: in such a case the pedestrian has 100% of the guilt, the driver has 0% responsibility. From the movie, the pedestrian is hard to see. Yes, people point at Lidar and other systems, but human driven cars don't have anything like this: any human driver would have the accident in the same circumstances. But how about the pedestrian, didn'…

You honestly think any alert human driver would have slammed into her as fast as that car did? I saw her in the video soon enough to have reacted, and I figure my driving skills are average. And that's assuming the lighting really was as bad as it looks from the video, which is dubious. My guess is that if I'd been driving I would have had time to slow down some, possibly saving her life. I also find it in bad taste…

>I also find it in bad taste to blame this woman for her own death.

Not only, it shifts focus from the actual issue.

Once said that the poor woman, may she R.I.P., may or may not have concurred to the accident, the focus should be on the actual performance of the driving system.

Where I live it is common (not every-day common, but every-couple-weeks or every-month common) that while I drive home at night (plain, normal country road, with speed limits between 60 and 90 km/h) and far less public lighting than what is seen in the Uber video that any of:

1) deer/roebuck

2) boar

3) porcupine or other smaller animals such as cats, foxes, weasels

suddenly decide they want to go to the other side of the road just when I am passing.

I never happened to hit any of them, but it happens from time to time to find in the morning some of the smaller animals killed on the road.

Collisions with deers and boars as well do happen but they are maybe 1/100th or 1/1000th or 1/10000 of the "crossings", I remember having seen in several years only a handful of these accidents.

For the record, the boars are usually more predictable, you can often see them on the side of the road before they cross whilst deers and roebucks simply appear out of nothing before your car.

Even if it is a single anecdata with "vague" numbers, my experience is that on average human drivers don't hit "suddenly crossing" living creatures very often, and even when that happens/happened I have always seen evident signs of braking.

Even if we value 0 the life of these wild animals, the damage to the car when one of the large animals is hit is not trivial and then there is the shock, the risk of the car be driven off road by the impact, some (hopefully minor) injuries to the drivers or passengers.

All in all, while it would be unrealistic to expect "perfection" from an autonomous car driving system, the possibility of someone/something suddenly crossing the road in front of the vehicle should be part of the testing with some solid evidence that the reaction of the software is on average not worse than the average of human drivers, and possibly much better.

Re: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash

#220

Post by lolc »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #53
wavefunction wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we accept your puny and limited human capability of "vision" as an excuse for a superior machine capable of much quicker reaction times and outfitted with a plethora of sensors that operate far beyond your narrow natural limitations.

Why should a pedestrian cross the street at nigh on a high speed street (over 30mhp limit) in front of a car? Did she know the car is controlled by a superior machine capable of much quicker reaction times and outfitted with a plenthora of sensors? Really guys? Blame anyone else except the pedestrian walking in front of a car? What if there was a train instead of a car, plenty of sensors and equipment? You completely…

Even if she would have crossed illegally! Drivers have to be prepared to handle situations where others violate rules! If you presume that everybody around you follows the rules, you make very dangerous assumptions:

1. that they perceive the situation in the same way you do

2. that their interpretation and application of the rules to the current situation is the same as yours

3. that they are currently able to control their body and vehicle sufficiently to follow the rules

4. That their vehicle does not malfunction

Can we accept that people walking across streets is a common occurrence? A driver, be it software or wetware, must be able to handle this.

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