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Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

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Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#141

Post by IAmEveryone »

DisruptiveDave wrote: post #30
fairpx wrote: post #13

Autopilot tech in general should be open and shared among ccompanies and universities. The more brains we can put on this the better imho. If these things happen too often, Im afraid regulators will start making laws that prevent the use of this tech, which I believe has the potential to really make life better for all... one day.

Serious question: how will it make life better for all? I haven't given that question a lot of thought, and I haven't heard legit answers from others yet.

Living in a city where people park on the side of the road, I can't wait for autonomous cars to completely transform the urban space.

Currently, there are two lanes of parked cars, plus two sidewalks and (usually) two lanes for traffic.

Autonomous driving would allow cars to park themselves off-site, such as underground garages a block or two away. That alone could double the space available for pedestrians, or other uses of public space such as outside cafes, green spaces etc.

The ability to quickly call a vehicle, adaptable to your current needs (minivan for family on Saturday, open two-seater for a summer date) could also start a major move away from car ownership, reducing the total number.

Improvements in traffic management (shorter distances between cars, coordinated starting/stopping, interleaving intersections) also have the potential to allow us to reduce 4-lane roads to just two. We might even find ways to make one-way streets work for most residential area. All this again frees up public space.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#142

Post by IAmEveryone »

gormz wrote: post #40

You can pry the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands. Might be true that on paper these things cause less accidents and less deaths, but I want to be in control of my life. If I die in a car I don't want it to be because of a software bug.

> You can pry the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands.

There's a non-neglible chance that will actually happen.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#143

Post by lvoudour »

edf13 wrote: post #121
lvoudour wrote: post #47

I wonder what "AI updates" are going to mean from an insurance point of view. Don't know about the US, but some countries in Europe insure the driver and not the car (eg. Ireland). How far fetched is for insurers to argue that an autonomous car software update constitutes a change of driver and demand that the updates must first be validated from them before installing?

It's a good point. Here in the UK I am insured to drive vehicle A as specified on my insurance documents. If I modify that vehicle my insurance policy is void and I need to inform the insurance co. and probably pay a premium. In your scenario the same could be true on a software update.

And it wouldn't be unreasonable from the insurers point of view, since any update carries a risk. What's going to happen I think is that insurance companies will probably need to vet the updates before allowing you to install them, much like android phone vendors. Running un-authorized updates will void your policy.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#144

Post by rayiner »

jacquesm wrote: post #137
lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

I totally agree with your analysis. What is more worrying is that even following the rest of the traffic would have solved the problem. If you are the only car doing something then there is a good chance you are doing something wrong. Also: the lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane. If two systems give conflicting data some kind of alarm should…

When I think of self-driving car technology, I think of all of these inputs (maps, cameras, GPS, etc.) being fed into a world model from which inferences are drawn.[1] Here, the car could have known from cameras and maps that there was a lane split, and should have been able to detect that the line following was giving a conflicting inference compared to those other sources. The question is: does Tesla actually do that? Because if not, it's not really self-driving car technology. It's not a glitch in a product that's 90% of the way there; it's a fundamentally more basic technology.

[1] See https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/2009/6/aimag2009_urmson.pdf at 21-23.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#145

Post by paulie_a »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #134
paulie_a wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I hate cruise control. I prefer to be actively engaged when driving. Either I am driving 100% or I am not at all, there is absolutely no middle ground in my opinion

We've actually moved quite a bit away from "100%" direct control. Anti-lock brakes were the first such system. Before, you had to pump the brakes in an emergency, a practice that was difficult to execute even without the shock of an impeding accident. That system alone certainly saves thousands of lives every year.

The average driver will probably never actually experience abs. It's a good failsafe that is rarely employed...if it is, you definitely realize it

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#146

Post by kalleboo »

darkerside wrote: post #11

I wonder if Tesla has a way to visualize how disruptive a change to Autopilot. They've supposedly got all this driving data lying around. Would they be able to apply the updated algorithms to that data and quantify how many decisions would be affected, and by how much? i.e. 30% of past decisions would have been changed with the new algorithm, 5% changed by an angle of over 2 degrees. On a similar note, shouldn't cust…

The problem is you can't simulate the video that happens after your new decision.

So this steering update would take you 0.3 degrees to the right. So what? Well those 0.3 degrees might change the angle of the line which influences the car to steer another 0.3 degrees, etc. But without that followup video (which you can't simulate from a 2D recording) you don't know how it would react to the change in environment.

The only way to regression test these things is in a simulated 3D environment (or miles and miles of real test track)

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#147

Post by jdmichal »

taneq wrote: post #45
jdmichal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how close it is and what it is. Have to weigh the energy of the impact against the pitch introduced by braking. You need the bumper to take the hit, so that it and the crumple zones can do their job. However, for a wall or highway barrier, it's probably almost always worthwhile to shed as much energy as possible. You're going to pitch yourself under the barrier where the bumper won't take the hit, like you…

> Have to weigh the energy of the impact against the pitch introduced by braking. You need the bumper to take the hit, so that it and the crumple zones can do their job. Eh? The vast majority of real frontal impacts will be under heavy braking. If a few degrees of dive under brakes is enough to compromise the crumple zones' effectiveness then your car is bad (and I don't believe any Teslas are bad in this way.)

I mean, this advice is pretty firmly held for hitting things like animals. Albeit for other reasons -- it helps prevent them from going over the hood and towards the windshield.

Generally the pitch won't matter that much in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Only when the pitch would angle the front bumper completely under the other vehicle, which I admit isn't much of a concern. And not really a concern at all in vehicle-to-barrier collisions.

However, if we're talking about idealized automated driving systems, I hold by my original assertion. I would expect such a system to be able to correctly analyze when releasing the brake right before collision to reduce pitch would be beneficial.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#148

Post by nemetroid »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #100
lafar6502 wrote: post #64

ha ha i dont see how this is supposed to improve safety. Maybe it's safer than having no driver at all but if we're talking about being better than typical human then the safest thing to do is to switch this thing off.

It still could be safer than most human drivers. We only have a few examples of their AI misbehaving. If it consistently crashed into the barriers, we would have thousands of deaths per day.

From the linked thread:

> This is my commute home- I know it does it about 90% of the time. It does it almost every evening and has for the last few weeks since 10.4 rolled out.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#149

Post by lisper »

jacquesm wrote: post #137
lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

I totally agree with your analysis. What is more worrying is that even following the rest of the traffic would have solved the problem. If you are the only car doing something then there is a good chance you are doing something wrong. Also: the lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane. If two systems give conflicting data some kind of alarm should…

> lane markings are confusing but GPS and inertial readings should have clearly indicated that that is not a lane

GPS is not accurate enough to reliably pinpoint your location to a particular lane. Even WAAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) can have up to 25 feet of error. Basic GPS is less accurate than that.

In fact, it's possible that GPS error was a contributing factor here but there's no way to know that from the video.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#150

Post by 6DM »

iainmerrick wrote: post #54

This kind of video makes me wonder: what is the "autopilot" feature actually for? Do people generally like it? (I don't own a Tesla and I've never driven one.) If you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, and given videos like this that show you really need to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, is automatic steering really that big of a deal? Cruise control, now, that really is useful because it a…

I think right now it's only good for stop and go traffic conditions and that's about it. That's still really useful for a lot of people.
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