Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier • Hacker News Board

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#441

Post by tbabb » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #201

dancek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. This is a very good point: just like a human driver should slow down if they can't observe the road ahead well enough, an AI should slow down when it's not confident enough of its surroundings. This is probably very difficult to do, and I'm skeptical…

> if a simple explanation exists, I'd love to hear it Basically it's a matter of having multiple redundant sensors and sounding the alarm if they don't all agree on what is going on, and also checking if what they think is going on is in the realm of reasonable possibility based on some a priori model (e.g. if suddenly all of your sensors tell you that you are 100 miles from where you were one second ago, that's prob…

I'd say that Kalman filters are perfect for this-- they optimally blend estimates from multiple sources, including a model of the system dynamics (where you think you're going to be next based on where you were before, i.e. "I'm not going to suddenly jump 100 miles away"), and all the various sensor inputs ("GPS says I'm here, cameras say I'm here, wheel distance says I'm here").

On top of that, Kalman innately tracks the uncertainty of its combined estimate. So you can simply look at the Kalman uncertainty covariance and decide if it is too much for the speed you are going.

I really wonder if Tesla is doing that...

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#442

Post by oldgradstudent » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #300

hw wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish. The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely. The same is happening with chatbots - more and more businesses think they can put a chatbo…

> I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown. > The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely. Agreed, the "but that's not how autopilots w…

> Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

The only things Waymo has shown so far are a bunch of marketing videos and a few tightly controlled press rides.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#443

Post by hutec » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 9:04 AM UTC

DSingularity wrote: post #182

dancek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. This is a very good point: just like a human driver should slow down if they can't observe the road ahead well enough, an AI should slow down when it's not confident enough of its surroundings. This is probably very difficult to do, and I'm skeptical…

I feel that’s the problem. Techniques like SVM can provide reasonable definitions of confidence. Reinforcement Learning.. DNN... the mechanisms behind autonomous cars... are they able to do this??

Yes, there is an active branch in deep learning (Bayesian deep learning) trying to model uncertainty measurements into neural networks.

Older ideas are http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/yarin/blog_2248.html or http://papers.nips.cc/paper/7219-simple-and-scalable-predict...

Basically Bayesian neural networks were able to model confidence but are not applicable in current real-world scenarios. Thus, lots of methods rely on approximating bayesian methods.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#444

Post by chrstphrknwtn » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 1:26 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #414

decebalus1 wrote: post #392

One thing baffles me. Where is the insurance industry in this? I would expect them to drastically increase premiums in light of these developments.

Here in Norway insuring a Tesla is no more expensive, in fact probably cheaper, than insuring a petrol car in a similar class. I'm pretty sure that the insurance companies wouldn't do it if it meant losing money.

Wasn't there (or perhaps still is) a government subsidy for electric vehicle purchases in Norway? There may also be a government subsidy for insurance, to further encourage people to shift away from ICE vehicles.

Cheaper insurance may have nothing to do with the quality or safety of autopilot in Tesla vehicles.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#445

Post by galdosdi » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #339

saagarjha wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try driving near a place with a lot of roads that are close together, like an airport. You’ll quickly see that snapping doesn’t really work, especially if you deviate from the route the GPS is trying to take you on.

I do this all the time and it works remarkably well. Amsterdam and the roads around it are pretty dense, up to 6 lanes each way in quite a few places with all kinds of flyovers and multi-lane exits.

At what speeds? I'm in NYC, similar dense road systems. At a reasonable speed, snapping still works because it knows where you came from. In stop stop stop go traffic combined with lane weaving and ramp merging I've found it is not hard to trick the gps into thinking you're on a parallel access road or unrelated ramp for a little while.

It's possible your highways are newer or less congested than ours?

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#446

Post by galdosdi » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

seaurchin wrote: post #356

rtx wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another similar situation where autopilot may fail. It sees a ball rolling across the street. Will it slow down, because a child maybe chasing the ball.

I used to contemplate similar situations. For example, a stationary person on a bike at the top of a steep driveway that's perpendicular to the vehicle's driving direction. But after seeing the video of the Arizona incident I stopped. It's too soon to consider these corner cases when some systems on the public road can't even slow down for a person in front of the fucking vehicle.

That's because waymo is playing chess while uber plays checkers. For waymo, these corner cases probably matter. Uber is not actually pursuing self driving tech, they are pretending to do so to defraud investors. Their troubles aren't representative therefore.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#447

Post by readhn » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #415

readhn wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shameless plug! haha just kidding and WOW! Autonomous driving so early on, JPL, Google.. Im going to go hide in the corner as well.

The most impressive thing in retrospect is that all that work was done on 32-bit processors with ~16 MHz clocks and ~8MB of RAM. And those machines cost $5000 each in 1991 dollars. Today I can buy a machine with 100 times faster clock and 1000 times as much RAM for about 1% of the price. That's seven orders of magnitude price-performance increase in <30 years. It's truly mind-boggling.

so due to this significantly cheaper availability of computing power one would think that today we would be making enormous progress every day.

my phone is more powerful today than most powerful desktop back in 1995. And what do i use my phone for? check email and read HN.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#448

Post by lisper » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #431

lisper wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stated so, that is plausible. However, "it is possible to engineer a system that never fails to detect that it has failed" is not They seem the same to me. In fact, in 27 years you are the first person to voice this concern. > I claim that any subset of states which is amenable to this level of detectability will exclude some other states that any normal person would also consider to be "failure". Could be, but tha…

What happens if all your sensors fail, including the one that senses the failure of your sensors? What happens if the power source disconnects?

Having all your sensors fail is actually a very easy case. Imagine if all of your sensors failed: suddenly you could not see, hear, feel, smell, or taste... do you think it would be hard to tell that something was wrong?

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#449

Post by lisper » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

andosa wrote: post #439

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…

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. That sounds highly dubious. Here's a hypothetical scenario: there's a very drunk person on the sidewalk. As a human driver, you know he might act unexpectedly so you slow down and steer to the left. This will help you avoid a deadly collision as the…

An even more extreme example: suppose someone on the sidewalk suddenly whips out a bazooka and shoots it at you. Does your failure to anticipate this contingency count as a failure?

"Failure" must be defined with respect to a particular model. If you're driving in the United States, you're probably not worried about bazookas, and being hit by one is not a failure, it's just shit happening, which it sometimes does. (By way of contrast, if you're driving in Kabul then you may very well be concerned with bazookas.) Whether or not you want to worry about drunk pedestrians and avoid them at all possible costs is a design decision. But if you really want to, you can (at the possible cost of having to drive very, very slowly).

But no reasonable person could deny that avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles is a requirement for any reasonable autonomous driving system.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#450

Post by lisper » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

readhn wrote: post #447

lisper wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most impressive thing in retrospect is that all that work was done on 32-bit processors with ~16 MHz clocks and ~8MB of RAM. And those machines cost $5000 each in 1991 dollars. Today I can buy a machine with 100 times faster clock and 1000 times as much RAM for about 1% of the price. That's seven orders of magnitude price-performance increase in <30 years. It's truly mind-boggling.

so due to this significantly cheaper availability of computing power one would think that today we would be making enormous progress every day. my phone is more powerful today than most powerful desktop back in 1995. And what do i use my phone for? check email and read HN.

> one would think that today we would be making enormous progress every day

Actually, we are. Back in the day, I would have given long odds against seeing autonomous cars on the road in my lifetime. Notwithstanding the odd mishap, today's autonomous vehicles actually work much better than I would have thought possible.

> And what do i use my phone for? check email and read HN.

What's wrong with that? Add wikipedia to that list and put a slightly different spin on it: today you can carry around the equivalent of an entire library in your pocket. That seems like progress to me. When I was a kid, you had to actually (imagine this) PHYSICALLY GO TO A LIBRARY in order to do any kind of research. If you didn't live close to a good library you were SOL. Today anyone can access more high-quality information than they can possibly consume from anywhere for a few hundred bucks. It's a revolution bigger than the invention of the printing press.

It's true that society doesn't seem to be making very effective use of this new super power. But that doesn't make it any less of a super power.