After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
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Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#2I have always wondered... Does the AP have some higher-level notion of object permanence, continuity (road behind a horizon or after a curve) and things like that? Does it track a pedestrian that is momentarily hidden behind an obstacle and will probably reemerge in a second or two on the other side? Does it expect that kids may run after that ball that just flew from behind a car? Does it continuously track and improve classification of all objects in the field of vision, with their trajectories and speeds if they are moving? Personally I don't think it does, otherwise it would not erratically slam into clearly visible and marked large objects in its way, or it would be aware of a truck moving in a perpendicular way and so on. I am of opinion that without such higher-level awareness it can never succeed, hope to learn about the state of the self-driving art.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#3Additional context: on March 23, 2018, a Tesla Model X, while using autopilot, drove into a barrier and killed the driver. This was fixed in a software update, but the issue seems to have resurfaced.
NTSB analysis of the March 23 2018 collision: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HW...
Tesla's statement of the March 23 2018 collision: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#4Eventually we need the NTSB to certify updates before they are pushed out over the air. Similar to what the FAA does.
These OTA updates are not ok for large machinery and endagers not only the Tesla driver but all others on the road.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#5Eventually we need the NTSB to certify updates before they are pushed out over the air. Similar to what the FAA does. These OTA updates are not ok for large machinery and endagers not only the Tesla driver but all others on the road.
Indeed. I have never understood the cheering for OTA of something that can literally kill you. Were they limited to infotainment and the useless easter eggs I would not care, however AP OTA is downright scary, especially pushed by vendor instead of being initiated by an informed user.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#6Tesla can only really gather depth data from there radars, while the cameras operate a DNN to detect features and make adjustments for steering and speed based on fusing those two pieces of data together. An error in the radar or the DNN detecting features incorrectly because of lighting, road color change or object on the road which the model was not trained on, can cause problems like this.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#7I would be a lot more forgiving of these screwups if Tesla didn't constantly swear up and down that they've solved self-driving cars.
As far back as 2016 they were claiming they had full SDC capability above human driver safety [1], and their recent Model Y announcement suggests that the only thing holding it up is regulatory approval, and not failure to achieve the desired spec.
>Model Y will have Full Self-Driving capability, enabling automatic driving on city streets and highways pending regulatory approval, as well as the ability to come find you anywhere in a parking lot.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19397942 (linking HN because it's hard to find the text in the page with their UI)
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#8Eventually we need the NTSB to certify updates before they are pushed out over the air. Similar to what the FAA does. These OTA updates are not ok for large machinery and endagers not only the Tesla driver but all others on the road.
I agree, but is there a way that could happen without slowing the process to a crawl? Depending on what’s involved it could easily push the gap between updates from months to years.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#9I have always wondered... Does the AP have some higher-level notion of object permanence, continuity (road behind a horizon or after a curve) and things like that? Does it track a pedestrian that is momentarily hidden behind an obstacle and will probably reemerge in a second or two on the other side? Does it expect that kids may run after that ball that just flew from behind a car? Does it continuously track and impr…
I don't think neural networks are wired to "remember" things. In theory, they could be hooked up that way. But your typical convolutional neural network is looking at things frame-by-frame.
In theory, ANNs could have an output layer that passes data from one frame to another frame to assist things. But there's no real programming to "hardcode" something like object permanence into an ANN. You pretty much throw a bunch of data into the system and hope for the best.
Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again
#10Eventually we need the NTSB to certify updates before they are pushed out over the air. Similar to what the FAA does. These OTA updates are not ok for large machinery and endagers not only the Tesla driver but all others on the road.
I agree, but is there a way that could happen without slowing the process to a crawl? Depending on what’s involved it could easily push the gap between updates from months to years.
This is a feature, not a bug, and should be expected in life critical systems. Would you want Boeing to push updates out as frequently as Tesla does with the same sparse release notes Tesla provides (“bug fixes”) when safety system functionality is modified?
Disclaimer: I own a Model S