Based what I learned about Uber their self driving cars probably run on NodeJS. I'm only half joking.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16684651 and marked it off-topic.
Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
131–140 of 334 posts
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.
This whole thing was started by a DARPA grand challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Industry takes the lead after DARPA's investment which makes sense.
Started? The Wikipedia page you mention says ”Fully autonomous vehicles have been an international pursuit for many years, from endeavors in Japan (starting in 1977)”, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars lists attempts going back to the 1930s (1920s, if you take ‘radio controlled’ as a form of autonomy)
The first DARPA grand challenge was announced in 2002 and held in 2004.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#133I don't know much about the logic used in self-driving cars - but I do wonder how they will handle roundabouts. We have a lot of them here (Australia) and you have to give way to a car that is approaching or entering the roundabout on your right - which often is opposite you. How will a self-driving car cope with detecting a vehicle behind the concrete barrier of a roundabout?
> you have to give way to a car that is approaching or entering the roundabout on your right - which often is opposite you. How will a self-driving car cope with detecting a vehicle behind the concrete barrier of a roundabout?
How does a human driver detect a vehicle behind a concrete barrier?
Either humans can see it and the intersection makes sense, of humans (and machines) can't see it and the whole setup does not make any sense.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this what the original comment is saying though? Considering the cars are driving on the left-hand side of the road, cars in the roundabout are approaching from the right with respect to the vehicle, not the left. Or am I misunderstanding something unique for roundabouts in Australia? The way you describe it seems opposite of intuition that vehicles already within the roundabout do not have right of way.
The original comment says " you have to give way to a car that is approaching or entering the roundabout on your right ", whereas the rule is that you have to give way to all cars already on the roundabout, without regard to whether they approached from your right or left. If they got into the roundabout before you got there, you have to give way.
This sounds really weird, Sweden also has roundabouts but I do not have to yield to anyone on the roundabout, only the ones that I will interfere with? Whether someone enters after or before me is really of no consequence. I am basically not allowed to enter if I will obstructing someones path of travel, with the additional caveat that both lanes of a multi-lane roundabout has to be free, since anyone in the roundabout is free to switch lanes.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#135This is interesting, but can we avoid posting links to articles behind paywalls? Here's one on the subject that isn't: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-ub...
It's helpful to post better URLs, and we've changed the submission to that one from https://www.wsj.com/articles/arizona-governor-suspends-ubers.... Thanks!
Please don't post complaints about paywalls, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. They're off-topic, and as long as standard workarounds exist (which users routinely post to these threads), paywalled articles are ok. Not that they aren't annoying; they suck. But HN would be quite a bit worse if all such articles were cleared out of here.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#136I don't know much about the logic used in self-driving cars - but I do wonder how they will handle roundabouts. We have a lot of them here (Australia) and you have to give way to a car that is approaching or entering the roundabout on your right - which often is opposite you. How will a self-driving car cope with detecting a vehicle behind the concrete barrier of a roundabout?
If they are still on the other side of the roundabout (and there are no other cars), can't you safely enter the roundabout anyway?
My understanding is that the goal behind a roundabout is to create an intersection where any vehicles that enter are traveling in a similar direction, improving the capability of people to avoid crashing and reducing the seriousness of crashes that do occur between vehicles.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#137Amen. Uber's fatal accident rate is now 50x that of sober human driver's. At their current rate of driving, they can't have a _lower_ rate until 2028! Inexcusable failure of their technology to prevent a human death in the most basic collision avoidance scenario.
A fatal accident at 50x the rate of a sober human driver with a study size where N = 1.
I'll have a go at seeing what we can conclude from the data. Others, check my thinking please.
Now we have 1 death in 3m miles for Uber, versus 1.18 deaths in 100m miles for sober drivers.
The expected rate for 100m miles for Uber is 33.333...
But how confident can we be? To answer that let's compute a poisson confidence interval around that rate, as in https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10926/how-to-calcu....
Let's see what a 95% confidence interval for 1 death in 3m miles looks like:
> poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.95)$conf.int
[1] 0.02531781 5.57164339
attr(,"conf.level")
[1] 0.95
> 33.333333*0.02531781
[1] 0.843927
> 33.333333*5.57164339
[1] 185.7214
> poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.9)$conf.int
[1] 0.05129329 4.74386452
attr(,"conf.level")
[1] 0.9
Now let's look at 93% CI:
> poisson.test(1,conf.level = 0.93)$conf.int
[1] 0.03562718 5.17251332
attr(,"conf.level")
[1] 0.93
So we can conclude with 93% certainty from this data that Uber is less safe than sober drivers. Probably a LOT less safe. Although the CI is really wide, this is shocking data for Uber, in my opinion.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.
This whole thing was started by a DARPA grand challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Industry takes the lead after DARPA's investment which makes sense.
The urban challenge could very well be the best thing to ever come out of DARPA. Riding in the OshKosh truck going around some actual roads in rough conditions is when autonomous cars became "real" to me. In relatively little time they had it going down roads in the woods and driving at high speeds within a few feet of a fence. Now that truck seems clunky and primitive in comparison even just against what Tesla is doing on production cars just 10 years later. Autonomous cars in another 10 years time still feels like a pipedream but then again I would have thought the same thing about where we are today 10 years ago.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What bad actions? Uber disabled the safety systems included with the car that was involved in the incident. They relied solely on their own, half-baked tech when these systems could have saved the life of person who was killed: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...
I remain interested in why the lidar didn't work in this case and I hope more details emerge so we can learn what happened. But it seems logical that Uber would disable the onboard built-in volvo crash detection feature, it would be adding another variable for a car that is intended to test one thing at a time. Its hard to see this solely as the "uber is being reckless" narrative instead of "maybe this is just how al…
If the Volvo crash avoidance system actually took action then things have obviously already gone very very wrong and it's not like braking when that happens would ever be a bad thing. That's like saying we should remove safety nets from underneath tightropes lest it get in the gymnast's way.
Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads
#140Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interes…
Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Arizona stupidly allowed Uber to operate after California kicked Uber out and after seeing the videos of Uber cars running red lights in SF. For what? For a few temporary (the plan is to be fully autonomous quickly) low paying test driver jobs? The engineers making the big salaries stayed in California (or…
This is what's always confused me. The usual play is to suck up to a corporation in the hopes that a bunch of jobs or other investment will show up, but self-driving testing is kinda a perfect example of something that will not give any economic benefit to the testbed state at all. It takes very little local investment, and it's a temporary thing that will only yield benefit for the corporation doing the testing, and as soon as they have as much data as they want they can leave and use that data anywhere else.
And if what Arizona hoped for is to get self driving taxis early, well, other states can simply let the sucker states like Arizona do the testing, then wait to legalize self driving till the day after it proves itself, thus reaping close to 100% of the benefits with close to 0% of the disadvantages.
I honestly think Arizona politicians just blundered because they were following the typical playbook out of pure habit. I hope the explanation is not less innocent than that, but that's also very possible. Petty corruption is very common in USA state governments.