Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#131

Post by mopsi » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #83

LeoPanthera wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a pilot, but I have had flying lessons. Airplane autopilots are extremely simple. They can basically fly you in a straight line, at a fixed altitude. Tesla's autopilot is actually way more advanced than those found in airplanes.

A commercial airliner autopilot (the kind people think of when you say autopilot) can perform evasive maneuvers and land the plane.

Landing a plane is fairly trivial considering that autopilot simply guides the aircraft down a radio beam, cuts throttle and raises its nose a bit when on-board radio altimeter crosses below 50 feet. First fully automated landing in revenue service predates the first microprocessor, which should give an idea of the tech used.

The difficult part is decision-making in non-standard situations like Sully landing on the Hudson with his A320.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#132

Post by parthdesai » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #83

LeoPanthera wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a pilot, but I have had flying lessons. Airplane autopilots are extremely simple. They can basically fly you in a straight line, at a fixed altitude. Tesla's autopilot is actually way more advanced than those found in airplanes.

A commercial airliner autopilot (the kind people think of when you say autopilot) can perform evasive maneuvers and land the plane.

Don't you need a special landing system for the system to automatically land the plane?

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#133

Post by craftinator » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #108

LeoPanthera wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate: Assuming self-driving cars are connected to each other, either directly or via the internet, if one car crashes, or even just makes a minor mistake, the knowledge of how to avoid that can be transmitted to every other car on the planet.

This is very close to what is actually happening, though not in real time.

Based on what evidence?

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#134

Post by natch » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:35 AM UTC

rjdagost wrote: post #94

deckar01 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla engineers talked about this in great depth during the recent streaming event. Manual disengagement of Autopilot is the mechanism used to trigger an upload of the sensor data. It is automatically uploaded to Tesla servers and used to train the driving model.

A Twitter user who rooted his Tesla claims that autopilot disengagement reports are very small ( https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1096322810694287361 Not the kind of information that you use to train computer vision algorithms. I found his claims to be an interesting read.

Definitely interesting but I wouldn’t trust a rooted system to behave the same as a non-rooted system.

Nor is there any guarantee that the snapshot in time when he did his research is representative of everything they do.

And such logging behavior can vary by car, by location, and by software version.

I tend to think it is in Tesla’s interest to collect the most useful data, efficiently, and make good tradeoffs when doing so. They say they are gathering data on interventions that will help improve their neural nets. I believe them.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#135

Post by LoSboccacc » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #77

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but in this case it didn't trigger.

These AEB features almost universally do not trigger on stationary objects when the car is moving more than 20 or 30mph.

https://youtu.be/kuxundRB1zM

good aeb trigger at speed. they might not avoid the crash entirely, but try to mitigate it.

Tesla is quite behind the state of the art here.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#136

Post by jekrb » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:40 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #87

I hear people say “self driving cars don’t have to be perfect, they just need to be safer than humans.” Here is a good example of why that might be harder to achieve than expected. Apparently the car had gotten confused at that exact location repeatedly before. That’s what self driving cars are going to do—if there is something “weird” it’s likely that every self driving car (at least, every one from the same manufac…

I have a "lane sensing" Honda that errors out on the same highway exit during my commute home.

Everytime I take this same exit, my car warns me that lane sensing had an error, that collision detection has encountered an error, a few other systems have also stop working.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#137

Post by praneshp » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:40 AM UTC

rasz wrote: post #88

zaroth wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His car increased speed because the adaptive cruise was set to a higher speed than his car was going, and for 4 seconds before impact there were no cars in front of him. The adaptive cruise increased speed to his set point when his car left the flow of traffic. The AEB will not trigger on a stationary object at highway speeds. I do not believe there exists any AEB that will emergency brake at highway speed, maybe exc…

>crash attenuator >this particular one is hit fairly frequently. Interesting way to build your road infrastructure

Not a big fan of bay area roads, but this particular junction sees crashes because of a high frequency of law breakers. There is only so much you can do against a large number of people that are super-happy to break the law because the fine/insurance rate is probably not a big deal.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#138

Post by ebg13 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:40 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #126

areoform wrote: post #96

I would like to add over here that Tesla does indeed do sensor fusion in their cars. Their Autopilot combines radar and ultrasound with vision to decide where to drive. Commentators bringing up LIDAR are jumping the gun by assuming that this scenario isn't something that these sensors wouldn't have detected in either combination or individually to spot the anomaly. The problem over here is likely to be software due t…

The sensor technology is a big factor here. You can use LIDAR for perception without needing a neural net. On the other hand with radar + ultrasound + vision you'll need a neural net to try to detect things like obstacles, since the raw data from those sensors doesn't directly tell you whether there is an obstacle in the way.

Everything you said is very wrong. LIDAR produces line of sight depth information. Stereo cameras produce line of sight depth information. Radar produces line of sight depth information. Ultrasound produces line of sight depth information. The only differences are how, how fast, and how detailed.

The biggest difference between LIDAR and stereo vision is that LIDAR doesn't depend on illumination because it uses its own.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#139

Post by ummonk » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:41 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #65

saagarjha wrote: post #19

The problem with Tesla's "Autopilot" is that it's marketed heavily as just that: autopilot. It's good enough to work that way 99% of the time, too, which is a recipe for disaster: things that work 99% of the time but have the potential to fail catastrophically often get glossed over by humans because it's hard to keep paying attention to something that rarely fails.

I'm not a pilot, but I have had flying lessons. Airplane autopilots are extremely simple. They can basically fly you in a straight line, at a fixed altitude. Tesla's autopilot is actually way more advanced than those found in airplanes.

By that argument, every car with cruise control (i.e. almost all of them) has autopilot.

Clearly, with their naming of their system as autopilot rather than cruise control, Tesla is trying to imply that autopilot means something more. Namely, it means the driver / pilot can offload the work of routine driving / flying to the computer, only intervening in certain times (e.g. off0highway or takeoff / landing) or in the event of failures / extreme conditions.

Re: Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash

#140

Post by CoolGuySteve » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:42 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #77

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but in this case it didn't trigger.

These AEB features almost universally do not trigger on stationary objects when the car is moving more than 20 or 30mph.

If you bothered to click on the Car And Driver link, you would have seen that these systems (particularly Tesla's system) work at least up to 50mph with stationary objects.