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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

#121

Post by agent008t »

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.

With self driving cars you have no idea what they would do when presented with an edge case they may have only seen very rarely before. With humans, you can in most cases assume the driver would do something reasonable, especially if there is enough time to think through the situation.

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

#122

Post by agent008t »

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…

Note that all of your examples had working prototypes; it just took 20 years to make them affordable/scale them (along with some incremental improvements).

With self-driving cars we have no such prototype and I would not expect one in the next 20 years. Unless we are talking about driving on specially equipped roads/lanes or in some special situations, where we might see them much sooner.

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

#123

Post by tracker1 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #113
calcifer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity. Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

Self driving car technology has huge public benefit.

If people aren't sharing the vehicle there's the same number of vehicles on the same number of roads, just less need for parking spaces.

Of course, the potential for reduced accidents should help. Unfortunately, part of why AZ was probably chosen is that it's mostly sunny/clear weather during the year.

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

#124

Post by xxxpupugo »

calcifer wrote: post #112
jessriedel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity. Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

Are you suggesting all taxis companies being banned?

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

#125

Post by masonic »

nishantvyas wrote: post #74
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.

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…

  amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ... but absolutely not for machine
A given human fail produces one event. A flaw in autonomous driving software can mean thousands of failure events.

Also, when a human driver's negligence results in injury or severe damage, criminal charges result. That's a deterrent. With autonomous driving, you can't prosecute an algorithm.

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

#126

Post by masonic »

Nokinside wrote: post #104
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…

Remote operators solve these issue. Once you have autonomous cars that driving safely, but can't manage complex situations like you describe, you delegate those for remote pilots that are allowed to operate car in slow speeds. You need 5G network coverage with mission-critical features (mcMTC) to archieve that. BLER 10^-6 and E2E latency Taxi fleet of 10,000 vehicles might need only 100-200 remote operators to manage…

  fleet of 10,000 vehicles might need only 100-200 remote operators
It won't scale in a predictable way. Let's say there's a major event in NYC (natural disaster or unnatural). You may suddenly need 700 operators at the same time just to deal with NYC and environs.

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

#127

Post by notahacker »

whatshisface wrote: post #61
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…

I question the claim that you need to predict the immediate future. Human reaction times are pretty slow, to the point where when our feet hit a pedal in response to light that hit our eyes two seconds ago, something that is prediction for us could be reaction for a machine. A human has to live two seconds in the future because our appendages and lower faculties are lagging behind in the past.

> I question the claim that you need to predict the immediate future.

Alternatively you could develop braking technology which gives vehicles a stopping distance of 0m, but this might be a bigger technological advance than full self-driving AI, and I'm not sure it would be that comfortable for the passengers....

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

#128

Post by Shivetya »

calcifer wrote: post #112
jessriedel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity. Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

considering the later contributed to paying for the creation of the public resource and their use is not exclusive nor impedes others from using the same I see no issue.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #106
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…

Yes! The public definitely has an interest in how dangerous other cars on public roads are. Imagine if the data showed that they'd had tons of near misses with cyclists for example.

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by dmix »

IshKebab wrote: post #106
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…

Yes! The public definitely has an interest in how dangerous other cars on public roads are. Imagine if the data showed that they'd had tons of near misses with cyclists for example.

That's not what the quote is talking about...
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