11–20 of 244 posts
Sure, slamming in the brakes is a bad idea. This doesn't mean the system can't start to slow down or change the direction of the car.
This is a pretty good explanation of the shortcomings of today's assisted driving capabilities. The marketing towards 'self driving' or 'auto pilot' should really emphasize on these. My guess here is that the lane assist and adaptive cruise systems somehow thought the car it was following switched one lane to the right, and so the Tesla assumed it was on the most left lane, without any moving car in front (hence acce…
This seems like how I would imagine a "dumb" system would be designed. One would imagine a "artificial intelligence" (of any sort at all) would find a way to smoothly integrate all these system. The problem is end-to-end neural nets or similar devices intended for such integration don't seem ready for prime time.
I still don't get why do Autocrasher systems think it's better to ignore stationary objects even whey it's driving towards it at a high speed! Sure, slamming in the brakes is a bad idea. This doesn't mean the system can't start to slow down or change the direction of the car.
This article and many others like it are written as if one ought to be ashamed for thinking self driving cars should not routinely smash into stationary objects on their paths or kill people: This isn't the only recent case where Autopilot steered a Tesla vehicle directly into a stationary object—though thankfully the others didn't get anyone killed. Back in January, firefighters in Culver City, California, said that…
Didn't hit me that way. Sounds more like we as consumers misinterpret what the technology is and trust it too much... of course, there's a feedback loop where companies like Tesla call everything autonomous and hype the marketing to mislead consumers.
If Tesla actually made Autopilot into an emergency braking (or, more generally, safety) system, it would be fine. All they’d have to do is make two changes: switch from automatic steering to a lane departure warning system (so the driver must keep their hands on the wheel and will always be paying attention) and possibly rename it. Of course, their stock price might crash and a whole bunch of customers who paid for s…
If Tesla actually made Autopilot into an emergency braking (or, more generally, safety) system, it would be fine. All they’d have to do is make two changes: switch from automatic steering to a lane departure warning system (so the driver must keep their hands on the wheel and will always be paying attention) and possibly rename it. Of course, their stock price might crash and a whole bunch of customers who paid for s…
This article and many others like it are written as if one ought to be ashamed for thinking self driving cars should not routinely smash into stationary objects on their paths or kill people: This isn't the only recent case where Autopilot steered a Tesla vehicle directly into a stationary object—though thankfully the others didn't get anyone killed. Back in January, firefighters in Culver City, California, said that…
I still don't get why do Autocrasher systems think it's better to ignore stationary objects even whey it's driving towards it at a high speed! Sure, slamming in the brakes is a bad idea. This doesn't mean the system can't start to slow down or change the direction of the car.
Still, you would think that there would be some threshold where the car decides, "Hey, this stationary obstacle is right in front of me. I should slow down"
You could imagine a next generation self-driving system that uses the combination of data from multiple sensors as well as maps to detect plausible obstacles. The mapping data could tell the vehicle when it should expect to turn. Maybe the vehicle could integrate imaging information from both radar and stereo cameras, to detect where the lane is, and which obstacles are in the lane.
Are there good existing techniques in the computer vision community for synthesizing data from multiple imaging sensors, like radar and stereo cameras and LIDAR? I'm imagining dumping all this data into an algorithm, getting back a 3D reconstruction of probable objects around me, along with metadata describing their velocity, confidence of the assessment, and all that.
I still don't get why do Autocrasher systems think it's better to ignore stationary objects even whey it's driving towards it at a high speed! Sure, slamming in the brakes is a bad idea. This doesn't mean the system can't start to slow down or change the direction of the car.
I suspect that it's too difficult for the systems to accurately determine whether an upcoming object is actually in the lane. It's not uncommon to pass stationary vehicles parked on the side of the road. If you're approaching those vehicles along a curve, they might seem like they're in the road to a radar sensor even when they're not. I can see why it's a hard problem: attempting to detect these probably leads to to…
From the article:
> When a car is moving at low speeds, slamming on the brakes isn't a big risk. A car traveling at 20mph can afford to wait until an object is quite close before slamming on the brakes, making unnecessary stops unlikely. Short stopping distances also mean that a car slamming on the brakes at 20mph is unlikely to get rear-ended.
But the calculation changes for a car traveling at 70mph. In this case, preventing a crash requires slamming on the brakes while the car is still far away from a potential obstacle. That makes it more likely that the car will misunderstand the situation—for example, wrongly interpreting an object that's merely near the road as being in the road. Sudden braking at high speed can startle the driver, leading to erratic driving behavior. And it also creates a danger that the car behind won't stop in time, leading to a rear-end collision.
This article and many others like it are written as if one ought to be ashamed for thinking self driving cars should not routinely smash into stationary objects on their paths or kill people: This isn't the only recent case where Autopilot steered a Tesla vehicle directly into a stationary object—though thankfully the others didn't get anyone killed. Back in January, firefighters in Culver City, California, said that…
This is an odd claim to make, since the article doesn't say anything at all about self-driving cars. Moreover, I don't think it's trying to shame anyone. It's making the point that there is a difference between crashing due to an error in the driver assistance systems and crashing due to encountering a situation that the system is incapable of handling. The tail end of the article states unambiguously that this is no…
Well, that point is most likely lost on someone who dies in a crash of these cars. IE, the difference is big from some viewpoints but irrelevant from others.
I think we can see the point where objections to self-driving cars start to become strong. It's not some cooked-up version of the "trolley car problem" but a situation where a self-driving car does something a human observer naturally interprets as "wrong" and "dumb", does it in a way that kills someone and the designers give the answer "sorry, not a mistake, just a necessary design compromise. This is still, on-average safer than a human". I think this would produce a strong emotional effect regardless of any "generally safer" assertion.