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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

#91

Post by bradknowles »

vntok wrote: post #90
p1necone wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they understand less and have less common sense by which to operate.

So, it takes a lot more work on the programming side to compensate.

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

#92

Post by tjmc »

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…

> What took a really long time, in post-1900 technology?

Fusion reactors. Still not there.

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

#93

Post by foobiekr »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #8
ttul wrote: post #4

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement. We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place. Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough. How quickly do think…

We won’t know how tough it is until it gets done once.

I don’t think we’ve demonstrated anything autonomous beyond the most trivial kinds of autonomy (e.g. the V2) in all of our technology history.

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

#94

Post by foobiekr »

jldugger wrote: post #47
btrettel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyclist here. In my experience, the majority of the time a driver stops or parks in the bike lane in an urban area in the US (e.g., I live in Austin), there's a legal parking/stopping spot within a reasonable walking distance, often within 50 to 100 feet. (If this isn't true where you live, consider the difference in the location. There are probably exceptions too. I'm told that legal parking isn't typically close in…

I often see waymo vans near San Antonio and El Camino in Mountain View. It's kind of a nightmare drive for all parties. Curbside parking is allowed, there are no demarcated bike lanes, and much of the road is in suboptimal condition. There is often construction going along sidewalks and buildings, and uber dropoffs are common. You occasionally see cyclists, though I suspect most stick to a side street. What I suspect…

Mountain View isn’t even close to a challenging environment. I would like to see Waymo try SF on the same routes as Cruise.

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

#95

Post by dmix »

> 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.

Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens inside a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's economy in return being the first to get the most training data.

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

#96

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #88
dumbfoundded wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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.

Why does a robot driver need to anticipate this? Does a human driver need to?

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

#97

Post by dmoy »

beefield wrote: post #79
nishantvyas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us... Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussio…

This is why I wonder why platooning technology is so much less hyped. Give me a platooning hardware kit to my current car, enough users after which I can join on my longer trips and literally more than 95% of my self driving car needs are covered. I really do not care if I need to drive a 10 minute stint on the city every now and then. And If I do, I can take a taxi. But getting my hands off the wheel and eyes off th…

Platooning kind of messes up highway traffic because people need to either cross a ton of lanes to get in and out of the platoon (if the platoon is on the left), or non-platoons can't get on/off (if the platoon is on the right). If everything was forced to platoon on highways it would work. But that's like 30-50 yrs later, after the tech is introduced, barring some really radical legislation with huge popular and state support.

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

#98

Post by jessriedel »

dmix wrote: post #95

> 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. Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens inside a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's ec…

That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

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

#99

Post by beefield »

dmoy wrote: post #97
beefield wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I wonder why platooning technology is so much less hyped. Give me a platooning hardware kit to my current car, enough users after which I can join on my longer trips and literally more than 95% of my self driving car needs are covered. I really do not care if I need to drive a 10 minute stint on the city every now and then. And If I do, I can take a taxi. But getting my hands off the wheel and eyes off th…

Platooning kind of messes up highway traffic because people need to either cross a ton of lanes to get in and out of the platoon (if the platoon is on the left), or non-platoons can't get on/off (if the platoon is on the right). If everything was forced to platoon on highways it would work. But that's like 30-50 yrs later, after the tech is introduced, barring some really radical legislation with huge popular and sta…

Not sure if it would be techically possible to have gaps in the platoon after every five cars, but at least it would be trivial to set max size of one platoon to something reasonable.

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

#100

Post by esotericn »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #96
Judgmentality wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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. Why does a robot driver need to anticipate this? Does a human driver need to?

Er, yes? Remind me not to walk close to your car :P
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