401–410 of 445 posts
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The video was very obviously obtained from a dashcam solution that isn't actually used to do any of the autonomous driving. It's possible they don't even record the raw footage from the AI cameras, that's a huge bandwidth hog.
They could easily buffer the last N minutes of recorded data in a black box. Not doing so would seem pretty irresponsible.
I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…
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Exactly. I'd expect collision-prevention to have absolute priority over any other system. It should not be possible for any logic bug or combination of environmental factors to make the car run into a large object in its field of vision. There's no need for statistics here--an overriding 'don't run into stuff' rule will suffice. If there's truly no possible route to avoid some collision and therefore the car needs to…
> I'd expect collision-prevention to have absolute priority ..to [not] make the car run into a large object in its field of vision. This is a good point. But I think we've all placed our "toes over the curb" with a car hurtling towards us in preparation to cross the street as soon as the car has passed. No system can stop at each instance of this, nor can it recover past the point-of-no-return created each time this…
Innovation is an uphill battle.
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I think you were downvoted to dead because people saw this as an objection to the parent; more charitably, I assume you're just adding more color - but you might want to telegraph your intentions a bit clearer.
He was not downvoted to dead, his account is banned, all his posts show up dead.
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My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.
In Poland there's an unwritten custom of saying thanks by flashing emergency stop lights for two ticks. The most common use case is when someone lets you through when they don't have to. On freeways the same is used by cars coming from the opposite direction if there's a radar ahead. Still, in peak hours pretty much everyone is a dick, even usually chill Uber drivers. Edit: it's also used as a "sorry" signal too. Als…
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You mean the video that showed the safety driver staring at a cell phone for 6 full seconds right up until nearly the moment of impact? Maybe that would have exonerated the driver, but only to prove how perverse our driving laws are. But in my state the driver would have been convicted.
Do we know what she was looking at? I haven't read anything conclusive of that. What would the driver have been convicted of? Would you be willing to get second opinions from prosecutors in your state as to whether or not they would have persued a conviction of that crime?
I myself was charged for a much lesser distraction a while back involving a crash in which I was the only one at risk and for which the other driver shared equal blame. If I had run down a pedestrian I have no doubt the charges would have been severe.
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> I think it should’ve alerted the driver. I like the idea, and if these pruned false positives are rare enough I think it would be a great safety measure - you could even have the driver verbally label things, which might have both training (in the AI sense) and awareness (for the humans) benefits ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling ). Note that "rare enough" needn't be all that rare, just that if i…
>> I think it should’ve alerted the driver. > I like the idea I'm not sure how well I would respond to a sudden alarm when everything has been deemed safe until a moment ago. I'd potentially need several seconds to figure out what is going on. I would hazard a guess that an approach that might be more fruitful be to have a meter that dynamically adjusts the "riskiness" of the situation between a yellow, orange, and r…
I want the driver paying attention constantly, but I want them paying attention to the environment, not a meter. A periodic "things are unusually interesting, what's going on?" query seems like a way to motivate that. But any actual attempt at a solution should be validated in testing...
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If single lane road deadlock is a problem, the city's urban planners should (and probably will) install a left turn signal to solve it. A better solution than reckless driving is to report the deadlock to the city.
Many of the roads in the city of Pittsburgh are carved into the mountain, sometimes with shops or houses on either side between the road and cliff face. The terrain there is not a trivial thing to engineer around.
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> There's this belief that humans are horrible at driving, etc, etc. Until you run that math and realize, no, they're not. There's just a lot of driving going on. I've been hammering this concept for a while :) Unimpaired, non distracted humans are actually really good at driving. We're optimized for processing visual inputs and making fuzzy decisions, have high dexterity and coordination, and fear death. All of that…
Oddly enough, even impaired drivers are probably pretty good compared to some current self-driving cars. I'd give good odds that someone with a 0.10% BAC would have swerved or stopped for that woman that the Uber car hit.
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The article linked mentioned "B was the problem", meaning it ignored the sensor input. Another article(1) about it mentions that Uber had reduced the number of LIDAR sensors from five to just one rooftop sensor. The president of the company that builds the sensors even said you would need side sensors to see pedestrians, especially at night. But LIDAR is expensive. So it seems that, like Tesla, they were trying to re…
I haven't worked with automotive radars but the way it works in aeronautical radar is that you apply frequency binning in the electronics and ignore returns that have the wrong Doppler shift at the waveform level, long before step A in the article. If you didn't do it this way your computer would be overwhelmed considering every tree and house you can see but only moving objects like airplanes. It's the same principl…
But Uber did seem to be relying more heavily on radar than the other sensors. From an article I linked in another comment "the number of LIDAR sensors were reduced from five to just one – mounted on the roof – and in their place, the number of radar sensors was increased from seven to 10. Uber also reduced the number of cameras on the car from 20 to seven." And for LIDAR this "results in a blind spot low to the ground all around the car."
They had to know radar wouldn't detect stationary objects. So the signal processor should be prioritizing camera and LIDAR reports of anything stationary in the road. If it really was programmed to ignore such a signal it seems like gross malfeasance to me. If not, then the speculation in the linked article is incorrect and it's the same problem Tesla's system has.