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Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

newsweek.com

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Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#31

Post by jcrawfordor »

liquidify wrote: post #21

Why don't we build some experimental infrastructure that is designed specifically for self driving vehicles?

A number of dedicated test facilities for autonomous vehicles exist, some operated by universities, some by government agencies, and some of the autonomous vehicle vendors own their own (more common for those aligned with major automakers which generally already have large proving grounds, but Uber apparently has a small one).

I think the issue is that a dedicated test area will just never reflect the full set of problems you encounter in the real world, and for things like LED billboards it's going to be a lot cheaper to test in the real world than to buy and install your own. On the flip side, there's next to no money in developing "vehicle-dedicated infrastructure," so no one's that interested in testing on it exclusively.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#32

Post by dreamcompiler »

dawnerd wrote: post #16
mike_d wrote: post #2

States just need to start mandating LIDAR for any level of autonomous certification, in the same way we finally figured out seatbelts were the minimum level of safety for passenger retention.

Why? Cameras can work just as well as your vision. Humans manage just fine and don't have LIDAR. Just because it causes the cars to slow down now doesn't mean it will in the future.

Humans have huge experiential neural networks behind their eyes that take context and knowledge of the real world into account. Teslas don't.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#33

Post by thelean12 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #14
mike_d wrote: post #2

States just need to start mandating LIDAR for any level of autonomous certification, in the same way we finally figured out seatbelts were the minimum level of safety for passenger retention.

Tesla cars are far from being autonomous. Autopilot (including the so called "full self driving") is level 2, meaning that the driver has to pay attention at all times. From a driver responsibility point of view, it is a fancy cruise control, there is no question about autonomous certification because the car isn't autonomous. If one day, Tesla thinks it is OK for drivers not to pay attention and wants to make it leg…

I've said it for a long time but: Tesla implementing level 2 is dangerous and irresponsible. Calling it "autopilot" is even worse (and has been ruled as misleading in at least German courts).

If a human has to sit there and monitor the car without interacting with it, then we shouldn't allow it on the roads. That means skipping level 2 and probably level 3. Go the Waymo route and go straight to full self driving cars.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#34

Post by GuB-42 »

dawnerd wrote: post #16
mike_d wrote: post #2

States just need to start mandating LIDAR for any level of autonomous certification, in the same way we finally figured out seatbelts were the minimum level of safety for passenger retention.

Why? Cameras can work just as well as your vision. Humans manage just fine and don't have LIDAR. Just because it causes the cars to slow down now doesn't mean it will in the future.

We also have a pretty large part of our brain dedicated to image recognition, in particular we are excellent at reconstructing a 3D environment from 2D images.

Furthermore, everything about the road is designed to help us humans. The size, color, placement, etc... of road signs and markings is specially designed for human brains to process.

As for the hardware, our eyes have very good resolution, field of view and an unmatched dynamic range. Far better than the stuff in Teslas.

So I'm not saying that it is impossible for computer vision to get away with just using cameras, but it is competing with what our brain does best. So a little help in a form of a LIDAR isn't too much IMHO.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#36

Post by brianwawok »

ianmobbs wrote: post #18
contravariant wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is LIDAR not susceptible to this? I guess it might be more robust against random hiccoughs (though I have no basis for this whatsoever), but is it also protected against malice?

LIDAR maps out the world around you in three dimensions, so with that data, there's no way it would mistake "a 'Stop' sign hidden within a fast food commercial [...] only flashing on-screen for a fraction of a second" (article) for an actual stop sign

But it would fall for a cardboard stop sign on a stick held up by a troublemaker.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#38

Post by colinmhayes »

smallstepforman wrote: post #35

There are many reasons why I dont believe in self driving cars, the first (and strongest) is to imagine that the software was written by my collegues (and myself).

I mean in that case imagine these people being allowed to drive. There's no reason computers can't be better than people, and many reasons they could be better.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#39

Post by throwaway2048 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #38
smallstepforman wrote: post #35

There are many reasons why I dont believe in self driving cars, the first (and strongest) is to imagine that the software was written by my collegues (and myself).

I mean in that case imagine these people being allowed to drive. There's no reason computers can't be better than people, and many reasons they could be better.

Not sure what being able to program has to do with being able to drive.

Re: Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

#40

Post by ecpottinger »

dx87 wrote: post #10
markdown wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they try the same with unwitting human drivers?

Read the article and find out.

Interestingly the article says it does not work on humans because it is just a image shown for a short time that people do not register the images.

Seem simple to handle, as the car computer see an image, it checks if the image show up in a second scan. Since the computer scans are very fast they should not effect to computer processing/reacting to driving the car.

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