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Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

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Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#81

Post by deelowe »

falcor84 wrote: post #69
zdragnar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road) construction. Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you can think of: * painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones * lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps * irregular and unpredictable v…

>Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads. Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

If someone did this to a human driver, they may make a mistake and potentially get injured, but pretty quickly someone would notice and do something about it. With automation, a cleverly crafted issue could persist for some time causing quite a bit of damage before it's corrected.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6ofa63/dont_turn_your...

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#82

Post by nradov »

zaroth wrote: post #72
zdragnar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road) construction. Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you can think of: * painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones * lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps * irregular and unpredictable v…

If it’s possible for remote drivers to assist a vehicle with no in-car steering apparatus through areas where the algorithm can’t go, then I think it can be done. Getting to absolute 100% will require either AGI or an incredible infrastructure investment. Now personally I think FSD is worth on the order of $1 trillion per year to the economy, so it’s the next great Moon Shot, and totally worth every bit of infrastruc…

It's hard to see how we could really count on remote drivers for anything safety critical considering that the current cellular data network is unreliable, lacks guaranteed quality of service, and has many coverage gaps.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#83

Post by inflatableDodo »

wpietri wrote: post #62
Animats wrote: post #54

That's useful info. I wonder where they had trouble with erratic steering. One Cruise video shows that where driving is alongside parked cars on a narrow street and the parking is irregular. The self driving vehicle is trying to stay in its half of the street unless absolutely necessary. Waymo still has to use "safety drivers". So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". Which makes it us…

Yeah, I think this is going to be a long one. Rodney Brooks, AI researcher and Roomba cofounder, says he doesn't expect a real robot taxi service before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ > When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers [...] they're getting close to something useable. I suspect that they can cheat this one a little. As long as they're in an area with good connectivity and the cars ar…

Run the live video feeds from the vehicles through a style transfer AI that has been trained on Mario Kart, then secretly stream the result to a mobile app disguised as a free taxi driving game. All the app needs is a feature where the app turns off adverts if the player keeps completing taxi journeys without crashing the vehicle and you are good to go.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#84

Post by jfim »

nradov wrote: post #82
zaroth wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s possible for remote drivers to assist a vehicle with no in-car steering apparatus through areas where the algorithm can’t go, then I think it can be done. Getting to absolute 100% will require either AGI or an incredible infrastructure investment. Now personally I think FSD is worth on the order of $1 trillion per year to the economy, so it’s the next great Moon Shot, and totally worth every bit of infrastruc…

It's hard to see how we could really count on remote drivers for anything safety critical considering that the current cellular data network is unreliable, lacks guaranteed quality of service, and has many coverage gaps.

Keep in mind that the vehicle already has all the sensors to do collision avoidance and navigation.

The remote control can be to tell the car "drive this path" instead of direct control of the vehicle over a high latency link.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#85

Post by dumbfoundded »

Judgmentality wrote: post #23
dumbfoundded wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 5 driving doesn't require AGI at all. It's an extremely narrow set of problems that have to be solved incredibly well. It mostly just comes down to creating an accurate 3d representation of the world from a bunch of sensors. You also have to correctly segment and label each object in that 3d representation. If you did those two things extremely well, the actual driving logic can be hardcoded. The problem is tha…

This is incorrect. The hardest part of developing a self-driving car is predicting the world around you in the immediate future. Knowing whether or not that object is a person is a lot easier than guessing whether or not that person is going to jump out in front of the car 1 second into the future. You have to know who is going to run stop signs, when cyclists are about to cut you off, when someone is about to back u…

This is incorrect.

Predicting motion once you have small time slices and very accurate 3d representations is very very easy. You can easily calculate expected paths. You have to remember that computers see the entire situation at the same time. A bike doesn't just cut off a self-driving car the same way it does for a human. Humans are slow, our increments of time are large and in the hundreds of milliseconds and we can only focus on a couple of things at a time. A computer will notice the slight change in velocity and acceleration within single-digit milliseconds. Then it just has to predict the probability of collision. These calculations are simple.

Deciding what to do in these situations can very much be efficiently hardcoded using decision trees. No one right now working on self-driving cars dares to use a neural network or any other unexplainable & unbounded ml algorithm for policy. You have to be able to hard code in new edge cases as they emerge. You have to be able to study specific crashes or incidents and then adjust the decision-making scheme to specifically avoid that situation in the future.

Truly, the hardest problem is taking in data from multiple sensors, segmenting it, and then labeling it. All in real-time. The sensors are faulty and super expensive. There are also so many different objects out there. If you actually look at the ancillary startups in this industry. They're not working on "common-sense" general intelligence algorithms. They're working to make better & cheaper lidar. They're working on computer vision problems. They're working on image segmentation.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#86

Post by Noos »

gpm wrote: post #29
moomin wrote: post #26

This might just be me, but it strikes me that the biggest problem self-driving cars has is that no-one actually needs them. Don’t get me wrong, you try to sell me a car that has the (fully capable) feature I’d definitely want it. But need it? Well, you’re not going to solve the problem of too many cars and the slow traffic that results with cars. It’d be hard to get special treatment for cars with a premium feature.…

There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US [0]. They are paid at least minimum wage. Alphabet has 148.299B revenue per year [1]. A conservative estimate of the revenue waymo could earn just by replacing truck drivers is 7.25 (minimum US minimum wage) * 40 (working hours per weeks) * 50 (working weeks per year) * 3.5 million = $50 billion a year. I think once you expand past the US, and past trucks, this is definit…

That's a pyrhhic victory though. You'd essentially convert trucking into retail, making a semi-skilled workforce as well as small entrepreneurial one into a just-in time near contract workforce with high barriers to entry to start businesses.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#87

Post by sockgrant »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #58
damq wrote: post #6

> The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even though it uses public roads as its testing grounds. What's up with this statement? Should I be forced to publicize my phone calls just because I made them while driving on public roads? It's utterly bizarre that the author thinks he is entitled to see Waymo's data.

I think the important point here is that Waymo is testing a dangerous technology on public roads. Putting the public at risk for their corporate benefit. If I'm a test obstacle to see if your car stops in time to avoid hitting me, I should probably get something out of the deal.

All car manufacturers test their cars on public roads.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#88

Post by Judgmentality »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #85
Judgmentality wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. The hardest part of developing a self-driving car is predicting the world around you in the immediate future. Knowing whether or not that object is a person is a lot easier than guessing whether or not that person is going to jump out in front of the car 1 second into the future. You have to know who is going to run stop signs, when cyclists are about to cut you off, when someone is about to back u…

This is incorrect. Predicting motion once you have small time slices and very accurate 3d representations is very very easy. You can easily calculate expected paths. You have to remember that computers see the entire situation at the same time. A bike doesn't just cut off a self-driving car the same way it does for a human. Humans are slow, our increments of time are large and in the hundreds of milliseconds and we c…

You're focusing on the wrong part of the problem. You're thinking of everything as a giant physics simulation, and completely ignoring the hardest part: humans.

Let's say you're driving through an intersection with a green light, and there's a pedestrian waiting to cross. The robot has the right of way and goes, but suddenly the pedestrian decides to cross in front of the vehicle. Even if the reaction time was 0.00 seconds it's too late to avoid a collision. The problem is the robot didn't anticipate that the pedestrian was going to cross despite not having the right of way. Humans are better at reading social cues than robots. Maybe robots can learn that, but it's a significantly harder problem than path planning and image segmentation. This applies further than pedestrians and also drivers and predicting their behaviors on the road. And if you try to drive cautiously to avoid this potential scenario, you effectively stop and crawl every time you see a pedestrian and are not very useful for moving from point A to point B (not to mention all the pissed off traffic behind you).

The reason it's difficult is because it's an uncontrolled environment, and the robot has to be able to anticipate what other drivers/cyclists/pedestrians will do. Robots have done wonders in controlled environments, but trying to bring them to the real world has always been a struggle.

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#89

Post by daniel_iversen »

Animats wrote: post #54

That's useful info. I wonder where they had trouble with erratic steering. One Cruise video shows that where driving is alongside parked cars on a narrow street and the parking is irregular. The self driving vehicle is trying to stay in its half of the street unless absolutely necessary. Waymo still has to use "safety drivers". So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". Which makes it us…

Mary Meeker's internet report this year is one place where you can see a summary chart that suggests that not only is technology innovation happening exponentially (which a lot of people agree to) our adaptability is also growing (which I guess it has to in order for innovation growth to continue like that?):

https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/#view/156

(however what's most interesting about that slide is that we no longer can adapt to the rate of change/innovation in technology)

So don't think things need 20 years anymore - how quickly before Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Google became mainstream?

Re: Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

#90

Post by vntok »

p1necone wrote: post #75
falcor84 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads. Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

You might be fooled by a man in an orange vest, but I doubt you'll listen to him if he's telling you to drive into oncoming traffic.

If you don't immediately see the incoming traffic in question, yes you will. Otherwise your self preservation rules will prevail and you won't budge.

Note that self driving vehicles aren't different from humans in that respect, except they see much farther.

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