Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#231

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #230

linuxftw wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if there are no landmarks, such as you're on a highway or rural area, not in a city?

Not a ditch, or a barbwire fence, or a telephone pole or a tree? I guess that may be tricky.

You can't reliably know the distance from pavement to any of those things unless you plan on indexing every physical object along every roadway.

I think the most likely scenario is self driving cars won't drive in those conditions, hopefully those conditions don't develop while you're on the roadways or you'll be parked somewhere cold.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#232

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

telchar wrote: post #228

dragontamer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, humans suck at attention. But until we can program computers to tell me what is a foreground moving object, what is a shadow, and what is the background... you literally can't solve the "Should the car apply the brakes right now" problem. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.02225.pdf Just go through this recent paper I found on DDG.gg and see the amount of effort it takes to parse foreground / background data that a sel…

Humans suck at these classification tasks things too, though, if you set your expectations high. Is it a cat or a bag, or a weird shadow? Doesn't matter, I ran it over before I could figure it out and react. Or maybe it turned out to be a boulder? Now I'm one of 35,000 traffic fatalities this year in this country. Computer vision has been improving rapidly in the last 10 years, I think it's too soon to rule out the v…

Expectations for CNNs with Tesla's tech is currently "Does not run into firetrucks". And they're not exactly succeeding right now.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

Humans are way, way better than current CNNs on this field. We can talk about cats, shadows, and boulders when CNN-based methods stops crashing into concrete barriers, parked fire-trucks, and 18-wheelers making a left turn.

I don't want to dismiss the work of Deep Learning / Machine Learning specialists. I just want to point out that the problem is incredibly difficult. It is very far away from being a solved problem.

> Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead

This is a known issue, a known pattern and has happened multiple times this year. Its repeatable. CNNs today are not working in this case, and fixing it will require a research effort of mammoth proportions.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#233

Post by zanny » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

> come close to being workable in adverse conditions

Given how people drive in the rain and snow in the Northeast, I would argue human drivers have not even come close to being workable in adverse conditions.

We drive in them anyway, despite often times magnitudes more risk of crashing, because we want to.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#234

Post by Fricken » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #231

Fricken wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a ditch, or a barbwire fence, or a telephone pole or a tree? I guess that may be tricky.

You can't reliably know the distance from pavement to any of those things unless you plan on indexing every physical object along every roadway. I think the most likely scenario is self driving cars won't drive in those conditions, hopefully those conditions don't develop while you're on the roadways or you'll be parked somewhere cold.

They do index everything, the maps they rely on are lidar generated 3D point cloud fields that make a model of everything around the road, and are frequently updated.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#235

Post by teraflop » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:00 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #195

pkulak wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line. How are mor…

> It was designed for binocular vision Does binocular vision even matter at such distances (i.e. beyond a few meters)? I thought it was only effective for relatively close objects.

Sure, as long as you have reasonably well-calibrated cameras and optics.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming 1920x1080 camera sensors with a 90-degree horizontal field of view, each pixel covers a visual angle of approximately 0.001 radians. If you have two cameras separated by 5 feet horizontally, and your measurements are accurate to within a pixel, then you can measure the distance to an object 500 feet away with roughly 10% accuracy. That's a reasonably conservative following distance at typical highway speeds.

And that's just from a single parallax measurement. By using other visual cues (e.g. apparent size of an object whose physical dimensions are known) and averaging measurements across multiple frames, you can get a more accurate measurement.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#236

Post by ddoolin » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

eddieplan9 wrote: post #218

01100011 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my optical sensors(i.e. eyes) provide me with enough information to discriminate a cat from a bag, so I suppose with enough processing we should be able to do the same with a control system. Cars have an added advantage that their vision systems could work in lower light and non-optical wavelengths. I don't see any fundamental issues with getting self-driving cars working. It may not happen in 5 years, but it w…

An intelligence animal being able to do something != "with enough processing we should be able to do the same with a control system".

Why not?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#237

Post by runarberg » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

100ideas wrote: post #92

dpc59 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to ge…

My wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50. So for the two of us, a Muni trip is - total cost: $5 - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time. - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end This process is familiar to anyone…

The muni system is one of the worst functional bus system that I have ever encountered.

Sure there are worse systems that don’t have any coverage (El Paso for example) but they are not functioning so I don’t count those.

Problems with muni include:

    - To many stops (like every two blocks).
    - Hardly any dedicated bus lanes, bus gets stuck
      in traffic too many times.
    - Slow and un-intuitive routes.
    - Small and overcrowded busses.
    - No transfer to BART or ferries.

I recently came across a muni map from the mid 80s and it was almost identical to an up to date one. That might give an idea of how stagnant the system is. The few good things I find about the muni system is that it has good coverage, frequent busses[1] and is cheap.

[1]: Sometimes too frequent, I sometimes see the 14 being stuck in congestion of other 14s

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#238

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:01 PM UTC

AlanSE wrote: post #146

anticensor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving car: ZF Electric car: ZF TaaS: ZF Self-driving advertising services: ZF All will be available, all from the same company. EDIT: Waymo laughed at "route-based advertising" when I mentioned, but ZF supports this idea. Route-based advertising or route advertising is an advertising model where your vehicle diverts to make you see a particular place and/or get you to visit a particular shop. For example, it m…

Silly question, but what do you mean when you type "ZF"?

[deleted]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#239

Post by stochastic_monk » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #86

dpc59 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to ge…

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

Paris public transit is stellar, fast, easy, relatively clean, and reasonably priced. I never once wished I had a car at my disposal in the city.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#240

Post by SlowRobotAhead » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #171

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use. NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC. Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instruction…

Not as good as Germany or DC. Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and…

It's easy to buy a card, and get on the right track. Your day to day minutia is of little concern to people that just need to get on and get somewhere.