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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#271

Post by collingreene »

blensor wrote: post #188
collingreene wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you think the LIDAR did not work? The LIDAR might have worked just fine but what the system taking the output of the sensor did with the data is the question. If you want to know what we would expect the LIDAR to have seen in such a situation we did a simple simulation of such a scene here [1] If the LIDAR was defective the system processing the sensor output should detect that there is no data coming in and t…

> Why do you think the LIDAR did not work? The LIDAR might have worked just fine but what the system taking the output of the sensor did with the data is the question.

Very true. I don't know either way.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#272

Post by philip1209 »

coryfklein wrote: post #256
philip1209 wrote: post #252

This seems like a lesson in why government regulation can be good.

The government regulation allowed the Uber on the road, so it may be a lesson in why government regulation doesn't work or provides a false sense of safety.

I specifically mean that Arizona chose to allow self-driving cars on their roads with little regulation and that lack of regulation contributed to the death of a pedestrian.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#273

Post by whateversclever »

ceejayoz wrote: post #268
whateversclever wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me that the relevant part of that video is at 2:06, where he mentions a news camera filming. That section is much darker than the earlier footage, but the camera is waving around making it difficult to get a clear idea.

Here, I screencapped the same scene in the two videos: https://imgur.com/a/LiISl (note the signs on either side of the road, the street lights, the hill on the right-hand side, the building with lit sign in the background, the purple light on the left-hand side, etc.) 33 seconds in in the YouTube video, and 6 seconds in on the Uber video at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/22/video-rel... .

mea culpa, you're right.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#274

Post by cbron »

losvedir wrote: post #234
galdosdi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it may be an instance of a "tragedy of the commons" but I think the most strategically optimal move for a state when there are 49 others is to ban it and let "sucker" states do the testing, and then immediately legalize it as soon as it shows promise. Just like how I never upgrade to a new software version right away, letting the other "suckers" test it in production for me, creating value for me at their e…

I had thought it was a brilliant move by Arizona. They were trying to be for autonomous vehicles like what Detroit was for cars back in the day, or Boston is now for biotech, or New York for finance. But I never thought through: which jobs are moving to Arizona? Autonomous vehicle production and maintenance? LIDAR and other sensor R&D? AI software development? Or is it just the test driver and the cars get developed…

It's a gamble to make the state look attractive for R&D shops/departments to either relocate or setup permanent testing sites. Automakers already use the desert conditions to test cars, so this is just an extension.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#275

Post by takeda »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #102
takeda wrote: post #66

Based what I learned about Uber their self driving cars probably run on NodeJS. I'm only half joking.

I don't actually know what a self driving car should run on, I would want to make it in Erlang or Rust but - what do you think a self driving car should be running on?

Hard real time system. Meaning every operation has a hard deadline and the car absolutely needs to react before then. No unknown delays because of garbage collection etc.

Sadly, I suspect that most of these self driving cars don't do that, because RT is hard.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#276

Post by takeda »

Johnny555 wrote: post #128
piinbinary wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some kind of realtime system. A GC pause of 200ms in a car could easily cause a crash. Sadly, I fear it may actually be written in C++.

It takes around 100 - 400 msec to blink, so an occasional 200msec GC pause doesn't sound too bad. Though I'd sure hate to be in a car that gets stuck in a 15 second full GC freeze.

> occasional 200msec GC pause doesn't sound too bad

I guess you never used Windows.

But seriously occasional 200ms pause is in ideal scenario if you have some kind of memory leaks those might become longer etc.

Hard RT system has defined hard deadline for every operation and if it says it needs to react within 200ms it will or it will be considered a failure of the system.

This might not be obvious to many people, but as cars becoming more computerized you no longer directly control it, for example when you press a brake, it is not directly connected to car's brakes by steel line, instead it is just sending signal to braking mechanism. That system is hard real-time, and it is designed so if you press a brake, the car has maximum time it needs to react to that. There is no excuse to do it later, because it was doing something else at the time.

Same thing should be with autonomous driving. It absolutely HAS to react before a deadline.

Actually lets assume the GC will always take at most 200ms and the component needs to react within 300ms, if that can always satisfied then you can call the system a real time system.

The problem with GC is that typically you can't guarantee that it will finish in 200ms or even 400ms. You can see this quite often with our desktop computers and servers which are not RT and many times you see a slow application or not responsive.

The difference here is that that when GC is taking its time, your website might have slower response, it might get you annoyed, maybe it will even make you swear at the developer of the application/system. When this happens to a car, someone gets killed.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#277

Post by rtkwe »

slivym wrote: post #206
galdosdi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it may be an instance of a "tragedy of the commons" but I think the most strategically optimal move for a state when there are 49 others is to ban it and let "sucker" states do the testing, and then immediately legalize it as soon as it shows promise. Just like how I never upgrade to a new software version right away, letting the other "suckers" test it in production for me, creating value for me at their e…

I don't believe this because whilst there are costs for the state of allowing self-driving cars, there are also massive upsides. The CompSci jobs that are involved in self-driving cars are highly sought after and by enticing testing of these cars Arizona is also likely bringing in high value tech jobs that would normally go to somewhere like silicon valley. Once they've established a center of excellence for that ski…

For testing self driving cars on real streets though there's not really a big need for local developers if the company is setup well at all it can do it 99% remotely with just a barebones support staff onsite for installing the new software and sorting out integration issues which can also be done at their headquarters on engineering samples on their test tracks.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#278

Post by stormthebeach »

xvf22 wrote: post #253
lern_too_spel wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The police department was also quick to defend Uber by saying that the crash was 'unavoidable'. From the reports it seems like Uber were heavily focused on putting in miles trying to make up ground. The NTSB report will hopefully expose the failures (if any) of the Uber self driving system or the organization. They've said that self driving cars are critical to their survival and if it turns out they cut corners / mi…

I find it peculiar that you would quote the police department saying the crash was "unavoidable" when I'm unable to find such distinct phrasing used in any news articles. The most damning phrasing is: "it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway".

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#279

Post by coryfklein »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #267
coryfklein wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government regulation allowed the Uber on the road, so it may be a lesson in why government regulation doesn't work or provides a false sense of safety.

clearly the better alternative would have been no regulation, and uber continuing to operate (???)

I just meant to point out that "regulation" on its own isn't inherently helpful. We shouldn't applaud "regulation" for its own sake, but should consider what the regulation actually is and how it functions when evaluating its value.

Obviously our roads need some regulation, and in seems that the regulation in Arizona wasn't the right regulation.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#280

Post by Aspyre »

mtgx wrote: post #210
ducktoller wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. When I have cruise control on, I take my feet off of the pedals and rest them on the floor. But if, say, a homeless person w…

Because Uber and possibly most other self-driving car makers aren't doing it right. First off, Waymo, Ford, and even Volvo (whose car was in the accident) have said that they want to skip Level 3 because expecting people to actually watch the road while they're "self-driven" is not reasonable. They saw from initial testing that the drivers were dosing off . https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/ford-s-do…

You are making a lot of assumptions.
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