Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#141

Post by tzs » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

I wonder if it would be feasible to make a fleet of race cars that have self driving technology that has each car communicating with the others and monitoring the human drivers, with the car letting the human drive but able to step in if the human tries to do something that would cause a crash?

I bet you could make some pretty good money with such a fleet running open races that members of the public can pay to drive in.

The self driving system could keep track of the number and severity of its safety interventions which could be used to give time penalties at the end of the race [1], so that the winner is determined by the skills of the humans.

Besides racing, you could also do car chases that recreate scenarios from action movies. Add in something to simulate guns, and you could do scenarios where a car with a driver and a couple armed passengers is trying to escape a couple pursuing cars, each with a driver and armed passenger.

[1] Or maybe actually do the time penalties during the race. If the self driving system has to take over from you, it could slow you down for a bit before returning control to you.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#142

Post by dharmab » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #126

bborud wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hit black ice you are screwed anyway. The most useful thing your car could do is to detect black ice before you hit it. I’ve seen some technologies for doing just that. Black ice isn’t very easy to distinguish from other surface conditions cheaply, but the technology exists. (It just has to reach volume production).

The very best way to deal with black ice is to avoid it entirely, simply do not drive if the conditions susceptible to generating it are present.

For a lot of people, that's equivalent to tell them not to leave their homes for six months.

It's possible to drive safely in black ice conditions with the right tires and appropriate levels of caution.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#143

Post by dharmab » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #96

tempestn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another exception of a sort, and I believe the one this research is meant to address, is when the drift is initiated unintentionally. Say you hit a patch of black ice mid-corner, for example. This kind of work can expand the envelop of the control system to encompass these scenarios.

How quickly can a car measure the available traction and respond to brief loss events? Can on/off detection response times and recovery strategies be improved for black ice (and hydroplaning)? If a car hits black ice, should it power itself down or should it max out the CPU looking for the instant traction returns on any wheel and do whatever it takes to try to slow down?

Modern traction control systems available on production cars and motorcycles have a polling rate of up to 1000Hz. You don't need self driving tech to handle most low traction situations.

Black ice is an exception because once you start sliding on it there is not much you can do to regain control except ride it out and hope you don't hit anything before you get out of the ice.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#144

Post by EGreg » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

Can an autonomous car beat the best version of Frank Martin in The Transporter series, let alone any of the Fast & Furious drivers?

Now we have the answer. It’s game over people! Even the fictional drivers in the movies have no chance against real world AI today.

This means in the future when an autonomous car or robot is chasing you — you may as well give up. You just better hope it doesn’t get cheap enough that someone can simply hire a swarm of robots or autonomous cars to kidnap people or incapacitate them or wreak havoc en masse (eg crashing into 10,000 gas stations at once).

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#145

Post by btbuildem » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

sap9433 wrote: post #135

If self-driving tech has become so advanced, I wonder why Waymo is not delivering anything? I wonder why is Tesla taking forever to deliver self-driving, why Uber discontinued its self-driving program, Why Apple ain't serious about Apple car yet? Does this demo hide something that we should know?

I think in this demo they simply paint a path for the car to follow. The cones etc are there just to help us see whether it's following the path well. If there was a cone in the middle of the path, it would've run right over it.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#146

Post by perl4ever » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #44

charliepark wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The trouble with pure neural net controllers is that they sometimes do something totally bogus for some data point within the normal input space." A friend's theory on Google Maps is that it sometimes intentionally sends you down a non-optimal path in order to gather data on alternate routes. This friend isn't in the ML space, so this is just their anecdotal observation. Are they right, then?

Unlikely. Usually a suboptimal route is chosen when there's traffic somewhere else. Sometimes traffic might clear up after the path is chosen. Its an appropriate theory though, given that this is Google we're talking about.

There is a class of routes I take, which involve going through a cross street between two east-west roads. Google Maps sometimes directs me to take one that does not end in a traffic light, which would leave me at a stop sign trying to make a left onto a major road across traffic. The last time I was stuck in that position, I basically made a right and then a U-turn.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#147

Post by tempestn » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

petschge wrote: post #71

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true. If you hit black ice and the tire skids, the problem is you just have no friction. Modern traction control systems already account for this as best they can - I don't see how this model would help any more except for trying to go faster through patches of black ice. And even then, drifting inherently requires traction in order to modulate the throttle and control the vehicle. If you can't…

The thing is: By the time the car has traction again it might have rotated around the up-axis. Getting back from that configuration do a less unstable configuration can very well improve if the car knows how to drift, especially how to go into the desired direction even before the drift has ended. Doing so would make the (result from the) initial lose of control on the black ice more limited and more controlled, henc…

Yes, this is exactly what I meant by a drift that was unintentionally initiated, such as by hitting a patch of black ice. Thanks for elaborating.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#148

Post by perl4ever » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #139

mjburgess wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean a very specific sort of model: a causal model. A model of that kind has to be able to generate predictions given the agents interaction with the object. Ie., how will the thermostat behave if I turn on the air conditioning. The problem is that we acquire these models during an entire lifetime of being embedded in an environment, esp. a social one. A self-driving car is never going to predict human behaviour gi…

> I think a car is going to need a Theory-of-Mind to navigate complex social driving environments As someone with a lot of experience in self-driving cars, my opinion has changed over the course of the last decade from "we can create smart enough models of these separate problems to create a statistically safer product" to "first you need to invent general AI." It becomes immediately obvious as you encounter more and…

I happened to run across statistics (iihs I think) for fatalities to (human) drivers per registered vehicle-years, and the number is about 30 per million. You may or may not accept that this is the right type of metric, but it's interesting to think about what the number implies. I read that Uber had a fleet of 250 cars in testing. If an average human driver has a fatal accident once in ~33,000 years, then to demonstrate parity in self driving, Uber would have to operate their 250 vehicles for an average of 130 years between fatalities. Granted, this is driver fatalities, so hitting pedestrians would not count. But even so, it seems it is a high bar and you would need hundreds of years of testing at the current rate to be confident you are better than human drivers rather than having a statistical fluke.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#149

Post by tempestn » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

dharmab wrote: post #143

floatingatoll wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How quickly can a car measure the available traction and respond to brief loss events? Can on/off detection response times and recovery strategies be improved for black ice (and hydroplaning)? If a car hits black ice, should it power itself down or should it max out the CPU looking for the instant traction returns on any wheel and do whatever it takes to try to slow down?

Modern traction control systems available on production cars and motorcycles have a polling rate of up to 1000Hz. You don't need self driving tech to handle most low traction situations. Black ice is an exception because once you start sliding on it there is not much you can do to regain control except ride it out and hope you don't hit anything before you get out of the ice.

Can't do anything while you're on the ice, but once you're past it you may still need to react to avoid a collision, and you may find yourself in a sideways slide at that point. So a control system that knows how to handle a drift could be beneficial at that point.

Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward

#150

Post by perl4ever » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

chkaloon wrote: post #125

Back in the late 70s, my high school driving instructor said "don't tell your parents, but the best way to learn how to control a car is to go out to the school parking lot on a snowy night and spin donuts." Funny that they are finding that artificial intelligence can use the same method.

I've never tried it with a RWD car, but as a teenager, I thought the behavior of FWD in the snow was really fun. Go around a turn as fast as possible, and push on the gas pedal, it slides towards the outside, front first. Let off on the gas, and the front snaps back to the inside of the turn. I also buried my car in a snowbank more than once and had to dig it out.