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Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

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Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#301

Post by nkurz »

macintux wrote: post #292
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leaving kids out in the cold is the issue. I live in Norway and beg to differ. We see temperatures down to -40 C in winter, and the kids love it. We don't have "snow days", it's literally not a thing here. All you need is proper clothing, some seal fat for rubbing on your face, and cold weather experience among the adults (checking the kids faces for warning signs of frostbite, etc.). 95% of Norwegian babies and to…

> 95% of Norwegian babies and toddlers sleep outside in their prams Can you elaborate? I don't understand this sentence at all.

Searching for the phrase on Google gives a good introduction: https://www.google.com/search?q=Norwegian+babies+and+toddler...

Summarizing, pram is short for perambulator, which Americans call strollers. In Nordic countries, it's believed to be healthy for infants to sleep in fresh cold air. To the horror of outsiders, babies and toddlers in prams are commonly left parked outside of establishments in freezing weather while the parent is shopping or dining inside.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#302

Post by macintux »

CaptSpify wrote: post #298
macintux wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we want driving to be more like bowling with bumpers in the gutters? Safer is better, no matter how we get there.

> Safer is better, no matter how we get there. Not really true. It'd be safer to just get rid of high-speed vehicles in the first place, but that would be disastrous.

Yeah, I knew that was a bit hyperbolic when I wrote it.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#303

Post by darawk »

justtopost wrote: post #232
darawk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be that regions with better climates receive these vehicles first. It's relatively straightforward to detect the prevalent conditions and refuse to drive if the weather is outside the scope for which the vehicle is rated. As the technology matures, that scope should broaden.

So road trips are unaccounted for? Not a comforting idea that taking your car to another area will render it functionally unsafe on the (differently designed) roadways.

That's a price I would very very happily pay for a self-driving car that works in my city. If I want to take a road trip, i'll rent a traditional car.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#304

Post by Retric »

Quanttek wrote: post #231

> The cluster of sensors, bolted underneath a chassis like a skid plate, can scan 10 feet beneath the ground to reveal soil, water, roots, and rocks. Once WaveSense has scanned an entire roadway, it creates a map of the subsurface strata that can determine the location of a vehicle within a few centimeters. nononono! Even assuming you can create sufficient map data as soon as there is any kind of roadworks - or even…

It's very useful for navigation not accident avoidance. Cars needs to navigate without GPS in underground parking garages for example. Reading signs and inertial navigation are part of it, but knowing you just cross the same point is really important when trying to find your way out of a maze.

The highway value is when snow covers lane markers. The GPS will still work, but it's only so accurate without those lane markers etc.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#305

Post by nkurz »

graycat wrote: post #107
rjsw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that with proper winter tyres or not ? With good tyres you can drive in pretty bad conditions.

Snow tires are a big help for getting going. They are much less help for stopping.

To the contrary, "winter tires" actually have comparable benefits for stopping. Here's are the first three findings (of ten) from a recent University of Michigan report:

Finding #1: The main benefit of winter tires is improved tire adhesion, braking and cornering performance–not acceleration performance.

Finding #2: Winter tires provide improved traction on roads that are below 7 °C (45 °F) even when snow and ice are not present.

Finding #3: Stopping-distance performance of winter tires on packed snow is typically about 35% shorter than all-season tires and 50% shorter than summer tires.

http://umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2016-10.pdf

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#306

Post by throwaway76543 »

zaarn wrote: post #172
throwaway76543 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars also have prior experiences and a sense of what other drivers are doing and why. That's sort of the point of machine learning. In fact, they will have a lot more prior experience than any human driver in the world.

Machine Learning still confuses Elephants for Cats. While it's quite fun if you pin up a cat dressed up in an elephant costume and surely amuses a few colleagues, a self-driving car is not something that should confuse an Elephant for a Cat. ML is IMO not reliable enough for use in self-driving cars, in complicated situations the driver should take over.

It's not reliable enough now, sure.

Similarly, my 6 year old is also not reliable enough to pilot a car.

Both will change as they mature.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#307

Post by wool_gather »

Shivetya wrote: post #259
btbuildem wrote: post #258

Honestly, it seems like a more workable solution would be to improve the roadways with built-in beacons to indicate where a road is, and where it isn't. The cars would work only on the improved infrastructure, but they would work. I suppose there is a danger of nefarious actors spoofing beacons to make you drive off a bridge, but it seems far-fetched.

it could be more easily done for limited access roads and lanes. like HOV and Express lanes. They are already heavily marked. Still in the end it requires a combination of changes to how we mark roadways, indicate construction, detours and the like. Think of it like the ADA but for cars.

I would think of it less as an "accommodation" and more as an evolution. The way that roads are marked right now is a direct consequence of the fact that the markings need to be consumed by humans moving at high speed. When highways were for oxen, horses, and pedestrians, they didn't need guardrails, explicit breakdown lanes, and exit ramps with highly reflective signs. In the same way, when the majority of the piloting entities using the road have other input options besides visible light, to support them we can/should take advantage of those other channels.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#308

Post by wool_gather »

Retra wrote: post #133
xapata wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> safely I've seen people do all sorts of foolish things. When the rain is so hard that I can't see more than 15 feet, I pull over and stop.

How does a car know it can't see well?

How does a human know it can't see well?

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#309

Post by okmokmz »

adrianN wrote: post #213
jakobegger wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are good at improvising. Not using all the lanes when the lane markings are covered by snow, and the road is slippery, sounds like a reasonable strategy. And nobody ever told us that's what we should do. With autonomous vehicles, you need to plan every situation in advance. Our current AI technologies can't improvise. It seems to me that current AI is basically just a decision tree with some neural networks sp…

We don't want machines to improvise because we want to be able to test their whole gamut of behavior as thoroughly as possible. We can build AI that can improvise, but that's not the kind of software you want to be liable for as a manufacturer.

>We can build AI that can improvise

Do you have any sources demonstrating examples of AI with true improvisational capabilities?

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#310

Post by rootusrootus »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #294
rootusrootus wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's where crumple zones come into play. Trying to have a computer calculate whether or not it is feasible to stop slower to avoid or reduce an imminent rear collision gets very complex in a hurry. What if the guy behind you is much smaller, or much bigger, what if his car has better crumple zones, or none, what kind of energy is he going to impart to you when he hits and where will that send you, who is at t…

In that case, I present a SDV that never makes a wrong choice - by remaining stationary at any cost ;o) In other words, there is always a balance between safety and usefulness, and the question of "is this the right choice" is always upon us, whether we want it or not. You can never have certainty anyway, what the software is doing is maximizing on some reward function. The TP also asks " is there even a moral compon…

To be fair, I said don't swerve for a squirrel. History is filled with examples of people giving up their own life for a squirrel/cat/dog because they swerved and lost control. You should have planned in advance what your threshold is for swerving. E.g. just brakes for anything Elaine is not a great example because not only did the car choose not to swerve, it also chose not to even try to brake. And on top of that, a human would have seen her from a lot farther away.
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