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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

#181

Post by Miraste »

alkonaut wrote: post #105
dumbfoundded wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course. > How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade). At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instea…

I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.

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

#182

Post by beefield »

pnutjam wrote: post #141
beefield wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You honestly trust some random driver at the front to make your decisions?

Well, that sounds pretty much like flying commercial flights or traveling by bus. So I guess based on my travel history, answer must be yes.

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

#183

Post by jessriedel »

navigatesol wrote: post #140
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. It's tiring reading commentators say things like this. Saying a professional journalist lacks "journalistic integrity" is bold. Why don't you step up and make this argument directly to the author, rather than being snide and posting it on a forum he will never read? Here's his Twitter; have at it: https://twitter.com/amir

1. I don't comment on Twitter.

2. I have confronted journalists whose practices I disagree with when I meet them in real life, and in general their excuses are not impressive. Most recently I challenged Ivan Semeniuk, science journalist for the Globe and Mail, when he visited Perimeter Institute for "The Future of Science Communication", a panel discussion we were both on. (Semeniuk was endorsing a different common journalistic practice I disagree with, not the same as exhibited by Amir Efrati, but I can't share because it was a private conversation.)

3. Challenging Efrati would be like confronting every panhandler who tells a false sob story. Newspapers are full of this sort of writing, and you could spend your life objecting to it.

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

#184

Post by dmoy »

beefield wrote: post #99
dmoy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, yea, I don't mean like it becomes literally impossible to merge in. Just that for any reasonable size platoon, it disrupts more traffic than it saves. Given existing roads and the existence of not-platooned cars on the same roads, it doesn't really work.

Maybe it works for long haul trucking though.

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

#185

Post by Balgair »

zdragnar wrote: post #65
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…

> 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…

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/06/flickering-car-ghosts.html

Essentially a POC that the car can see, but is so brief that the human cannot see anything.

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

#186

Post by alkonaut »

Miraste wrote: post #181
alkonaut wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course. > How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade). At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instea…

I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.

Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways, and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here" a.k.a. not 100%

I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.

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

#187

Post by thwythwy »

falcolas wrote: post #163
zodiac wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about tax-paying non-citizen residents, tourists etc?

They pay for their road use through gasoline and sales taxes.

And Waymo got a deal from Arizona that waived all sales tax and provided for unlimited free gas?! That's outrageous!!

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

#188

Post by Kadin »

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…

I doubt that most human drivers are good enough to avoid a collision in that situation. You will always be able to come up with a scenario that will fool a computer; you can also always come up with a scenario that will fool a human driver.

The standard isn't "perfect under all conditions", it's "better than a human". Humans are, honestly, pretty bad at driving. The bar is not that high, perhaps unfortunately.

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

#189

Post by masonic »

ghaff wrote: post #179
nishantvyas wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. point about the charges would be a thing, something that should be debated... would "use at your own risk" vindicate the company behind autonomous vehicle? or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions? i guess never in the history, we had so much advance automations in direct hands of consumer... As for the failure, I have reasons to disagree... if autonomous cars are working under "unsupervised learnings",…

>or owner is responsible for his vehicle's actions? If it's sold as fully autonomous, i.e. significantly beyond Tesla's system today, I don't see how the manufacturer could not have the liability. How comfortable would you be to use a car that could expose you to severe criminal liability because some company made a mistake with their software?

liability is assumed. I speak to criminal prosecution like an impaired human driver would face in addition to financial liability. The automated vehicle would face no criminal exposure.

The company responsible would also have a clear incentive to alter/destroy any damning evidence gathered in telemetry.

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

#190

Post by pnutjam »

beefield wrote: post #182
pnutjam wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You honestly trust some random driver at the front to make your decisions?

Well, that sounds pretty much like flying commercial flights or traveling by bus. So I guess based on my travel history, answer must be yes.

When I fly, it's a trained pilot. Even for driving is stricter licensing for cdl.
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