Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

Only motorways in the UK, and roads designated under special classification.

I've walked and cycled along multilane A-roads. It's not fun but it's legal.

Braking before a turn ( or trailing-off in the turn ) is only necessary when the approach speed is higher than the entry speed.

For a computer-driven car with accurate mapping, and hence foresight, it is more efficient to plan the approach so that no braking is necessary. After all, reducing cost requires efficiency rather than speed. Likewise on a long cycle ride I'll try to match the approach and entry speeds by easing-off rather than throwing-away calories by braking.

QUESTION: Is this really and AI problem or is it a sensor problem.

I mean, if there’s a big blob of something solid in the road in front of you, it doesn’t really matter what it is does it. You still have to not run into it.

It seems that because these poor AIs are relying on LIDAR and even just radar and cameras with Tesla, that they aren’t confident enough in that data to stop if they sense a big blob of something in the road.

If you gave any of these AIs a really high quality 3D rendering of the area around them I would presume they’d do a damn fine job of navigating it and not running into anything. At that point it’s just a computer game.

So either we need better sensors or better algorithms for extracting better 3D data from the existing ones.

It’s not like these fatalities are caused by particularly crazy problems. It’s not that a kid ran behind an ice cream van and the AI couldn’t predict it would run into the road like a human would. It’s just that they make dumb decisions a learner driver wouldn’t make because they can’t see the road properly.

Again, the law and custom already cover this.

When you hear a siren you're to become alert for the possibility of flashers behind you. You are not supposed to just start pulling over because it may not be on the same road as you and pulling over may block traffic. Imagine if every car in a crowded downtown pulled over every time the drivers could hear a siren. Instant gridlock.

So a siren played loudly on the radio will not cause a rule-following car to pull over, regardless of who or what is driving it. I presume you're talking about siren sounds in music, but...

Installing flashers that produce the same pattern as official police flashers and/or playing a continual siren is impersonating an officer. That's a serious crime.

Fake flashers will probably cause self-driving cars to pull over but they'll also cause humans to pull over. Not a self-driving car problem.

In the future police flashers can have a cryptographic element emdedded in the flash pattern that a self-driving car or a human-driven car with sensors can authenticate but that's an enhancement over the current situation.

It's one of the best-defined situations in traffic because it's precisely the fallback behavior. Detect emergency vehicle behind you, pull over as far as is safe, wait. If a self-driving car can't do that then it's hardly self-driving at all.

The real trouble, which you haven't brought up, is when the traffic is already at a standstill and an emergency vehicle approaches. The soft and gradual scooch-scooch movements that we have to do to clear enough space for the emergency vehicle are a much tougher case.

You can pull over a self-driving car. You just may have difficulty getting past it to an emergency.

More I read about AV, more I get the idea that, these AVs need to think to some extent like a human driver. My notion is that, these AV research focus blindly on making individual cars think too much. Am curious what happens if the thinking and data-collection is distributed instead, like swarm intelligence, each AV nearby can broadcast what it sees and where it is(extends the vision of each car in a given location beyond it's own sensors); front car suddenly breaks/had an accident/roadblock/switched to human intervention => all following cars will negotiate if they should bypass(reporting car will be parking) or wait (reporting car will use another lane); a car is on a blind turn => oncoming traffic from both sides can negotiate if this car should attempt the turn because others are far enough/slow enough to let it turn safely or wait until they are gone(high speed so not enough time for turning car before that one approaches); a road is very confusing so all cars following should switch to/request human intervention with ample time ... etc and given how cellular phones switch nicely between different towers and areas, we can use similar tech to allow all nearby cars to communicate ... that is communicate, coordinate and decide. Now this have some issues like privacy, drivers with bad intention can feed bad data to cause mass confusion, legitimacy of data received etc ... which can probably be an interesting place to borrow some ideas from blockchain to verify legitimacy etc ... I think instead of focusing too much on ml, try to incorporate other techs which solve minor but similar issues is a good idea.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to have full/partial/enough understanding of any AV technology/blockchain/distributed computing/swarm intelligence etc... so my comment is more or less an opinion based on what I think may be interesting, which may or may not be already thought by and discarded for not-enough viability by the AV research.