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Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#151

Post by morsch »

makewavesnotwar wrote: post #128
paulie_a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest, actual mass deployed self driving tech is probably 20 years away at minimum. I personally might be able to enjoy it just before I retire.

Unless companies like Tesla stop worrying about being the next "Great American Industry" and start focusing on real world problems and their solutions. If Tesla could develop a network of self driving buses, that would have far greater reach and impact than trying to solve how to make a private network for charging and all case-considered self-driving system for asshole-mobiles. Not that Tesla cars aren't amazing, bu…

Divide your miles by 10 and they seem about right.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#152

Post by Dylan16807 »

beefield wrote: post #129
atomical wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People smell better in Europe? When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.

> No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day. I take 15 minutes crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers over one hour of solitude in a small metal box with windows any day. Nobody has managed to explain me how self driving cars reduces congestion. It is space that is the limiting factor, and I do not understand how autonomous cars reduce the need for that. Vice versa, r…

> I take 15 minutes crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers over one hour of solitude in a small metal box with windows any day.

Why those durations? I would expect a typical car trip to be faster than transit, since it takes a direct route with no stops.

If transit is even as fast as driving, I'll take it 90% of the time. But that's quite an undertaking.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#153

Post by jacobush »

Animats wrote: post #135
jacobush wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how many are fired by angry managers. If you are unlucky, only the wood carving ones are left.

Tesla's "autopilot" project has had at least 3 of the project leaders quit.[1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/tesla-autopilot-crisis-...

I could also imagine being a reluctant woodcarver ... "Yes master. If we keep carving this piece of wooden golem, it will come alive!"

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

Someone wrote: post #69
Retric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these are already fairly close to human fatality rates. Tessa is well over 300,000 cars sold, if the average car has 10k miles that's 3 billion. Edit: actual number well over that https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles... Using US fatality rates you would expect ~34 deaths from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the... Edit, my numbers where low. So, as far as…

A few things you’ll have to correct for: - Tesla’s cars are newer and more expensive than the average car on US roads (making them safer) - Tesla’s Autopilot mostly, if not only, gets used on roads that are safer than average. - Tesla drivers may have had to intervene a lot to prevent more deaths. - not all those Tesla’s ended up on US roads (probably not something with large impact)

If you're measuring the raw efficiency of the self-driving mechanism, you have to correct for those.

If you're measuring whether the actual experience of using autopilot meets the prevailing standards by which we judge "safe enough" as a country, you don't want to correct for those first three.

Especially the "the cars are new and safe overall" factor. Correcting for that is like "correcting for" the fact that all the dangerous lithium ion cells are carefully packed and armored, and coming to the conclusion that sitting in a Tesla is less safe than sitting in a bonfire.

It makes the arguments a lot worse when people don't distinguish those two questions.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#155

Post by telesilla »

I'm so glad I read this. I've been driving a VW Golf with adaptive cruise control and enjoying its responsiveness in heavy traffic. Knowing that it doesn't work with stationary objects will really change how alert I keep my foot near the brake pedal. The first time I realise what adaptive cruise control was I was delighted but I've become increasingly worried that I rely on it too much so I'm interested to try driving a Tesla or similar vehicle to see how I react cognitively to a car that takes over more control. Anyone have any similar experience?

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

daferna wrote: post #125

Autopilot would have worked fine if the lane markings were properly painted. No one will blame Caltrans terrible maintenance of 101. As I am writing this, NB 101 near Oregon Expressway has been under construction for over two years with no painted lane markings (and the lanes suddenly become super narrow), leading to merge hell and probably at least 3-4 fender benders a week. The Tesla GUI shows you whether or not it…

If you find a self-driving car that's straddling lanes because the markers are excessively degraded, I'll be happy to blame the transit authority.

This car left the road entirely. There's no excuse for that.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#157

Post by Dylan16807 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #18
raverbashing wrote: post #11

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…

> 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 too many false positives.

This dilemma is only really bad for a passive system. For a system that's actively steering, it can make a committed decision to curve, so that even if it misjudged the obstacle it still won't crash.

It doesn't hurt to slow down for a predicted near-miss either, as you get close to it.

> 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"

Yeah. There's a big difference between "obstacle might be in the way" and "obstacle is definitely in the way".

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#158

Post by TulliusCicero »

School-Cotton wrote: post #80
kjksf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is definition of "mass"? Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" ( https://waymo.com/apply/faq/ ) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now. See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym... They already have…

What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ? I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.

Weather is probably one of the easier problems to tackle. Sure, performance will be worse in a snowstorm, but that's true of humans too. Waymo has already showed they can filter out snowflakes. Maybe it wouldn't work in white-out conditions, but in that case, again, humans also can't really drive.

The more complex things that can happen in urban areas though, yeah that's hard. All kinds of weird shit can happen that takes social understanding to know how to deal with. Right now it looks like for those situations Waymo is relying on remote "coaches" that tell the cars what to do at a high level (guidance, but not directly control).

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#159

Post by icc97 »

dmode wrote: post #139
macspoofing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only irresponsible car company has been Tesla (and Uber). All the other companies positioned their adaptive systems correctly and very conservatively. Tesla came out and downright asserted their system was autonomous[1]. Predictably, they have since had to scale that back significantly. [1] https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/videos/autopilot-self-driving-ha...

Tesla literally never says that autopilot system is self driving and has repeated nags and reminders to keep hands on the wheel and pay attention. This message is repeated during onboarding, training videos, and manual etc. 99% of Tesla owners follow these instructions. There will of course be 1% drivers who will not.

> repeated nags and reminders to keep hands on the wheel and pay attention

Above 45mph hands free is allowed for 3 minutes [0] when following another car or 1 minute if not. There's no eye tracking unlike Super Cruise [1]. It only takes seconds to get distracted as the video of the Uber driver proved.

> There will of course be 1% drivers who will not.

It's the 1% that kill people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Alerts

[1]: http://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-c...

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#160

Post by dogma1138 »

lovemenot wrote: post #90
dchichkov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be even worse than that. They likely think that they are on the path, because they are running a massive data-collection campaign on the sensor suite installed on the fleet. But the reality might be different. Running a data collection campaign is easy. Engineering products with machine learning is hard. Most of the teams don't even know what they need to know, to do it right. And so they engage into classic…

>> Running a data collection campaign is easy. Not sure why you think so. If this is correct, there should be many other equivalent or better campaigns currently running at the same scale, right? On the contrary, I imagine that data is a very significant limiting factor in this field. Both data and computation are hard problems. AFAIK Tesla should still be leading in the former category by virtue of the number of its…

MobilEye uses all of their ADAS cameras and enables OEM participation in their crowdsourced mapping project https://www.mobileye.com/our-technology/rem/

I’m pretty sure those outnumber Tesla.

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