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San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

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Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#91

Post by InCityDreams »

fallingknife wrote: post #85
jwr wrote: post #72

I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment. Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can…

You could say the same for regular cars when they first arrived on the road. Saying there should be a higher bar is useless unless you are able to say exactly what that bar should be.

1) lights on when required. 2) ...

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#92

Post by paulcole »

logifail wrote: post #34
bmitc wrote: post #2

I remain confused on how these cars are allowed on the road. Did they pass a driver's license check? Who's responsible? Who gets the ticket? In this instance, you can see that the car performed a dangerous maneuver by running from the cops, with its lights still off, and crossing an intersection, which is then spun by the company as finding a "safer" spot to pull over at. Even though, it found a spot essentially iden…

> Did they pass a driver's license check? Thought experiment: imagine a particular self-driving algo were to do something that would warrant a human driver getting their driving licence suspended, would that mean all the cars with that same algo would be simultanously suspended, or just that one car?

Easy. All of the cars with that algo would be simultaneously suspended.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#93

Post by paulcole »

mobilio wrote: post #20
cdot2 wrote: post #17

"Cruise vehicles are only authorized to drive from 10PM to 6AM, which obviously makes headlights pretty important." So why rely on the automatic headlights at all? Why not just set the headlights on manually?

In EU there is a law that you should drive with headlight all time. Old cars drive with low beam, new cars comes with daytime running lights (DRLs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp#European_...

If a law says you should do something, it’s not a law it’s a suggestion.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#94

Post by hakuseki »

tiku wrote: post #86
hakuseki wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does sound silly at first, but I think suspending the one car is actually a rather elegant solution on several counts. 1. Easy to implement 2. Doesn't punish fleet scale (compare: suspending the whole fleet means a fleet that's twice as large would be suspended twice as often) 3. Punishes the fleet owner in proportion to the frequency of the error 4. Is exactly correct when the cause is really a hardware problem s…

But the software "that did the crime" is all the same..

Yes, and that's why suspending the one car might seem counterintuitive. But that doesn't mean it's a bad solution.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#95

Post by flohofwoe »

logifail wrote: post #34
bmitc wrote: post #2

I remain confused on how these cars are allowed on the road. Did they pass a driver's license check? Who's responsible? Who gets the ticket? In this instance, you can see that the car performed a dangerous maneuver by running from the cops, with its lights still off, and crossing an intersection, which is then spun by the company as finding a "safer" spot to pull over at. Even though, it found a spot essentially iden…

> Did they pass a driver's license check? Thought experiment: imagine a particular self-driving algo were to do something that would warrant a human driver getting their driving licence suspended, would that mean all the cars with that same algo would be simultanously suspended, or just that one car?

That's easy and obvious: The whole fleet is "grounded" (or at least the self-driving feature disabled) until the bug has been identified and fixed. If you ask me, only a single car misbehaving is actually much more alarming than if the bug manifests in all cars of that type.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#96

Post by dahfizz »

pxmpxm wrote: post #74
qayxc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very intriguing scenario indeed. Due to the non-deterministic nature of many self-driving systems, I'd reckon a broader investigation would have to follow. Should that investigation reveal a reproducible behaviour, a recall or general suspension of vehicles running that particular software version would seem like a reasonable response. Otherwise suspending just that one car could be an option. It's uncharte…

How is it non-deterministic? If you run the same trained model on the same input data, you should arrive at the exactly identical output.

I think 'chaotic' is the technical term. It is technically deterministic, but the system is incomprehensibly complex and sensitive, such that it may as well be non deterministic / pseudorandom.

You could drive the same car down the same road at the same time tomorrow, and it may behave differently. It makes bugs / edges cases impossible to reproduce and fix.

With a human you can just say "why did you do that? Don't do that." Little fine tuned tweaks to neural nets is not so easy.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#97

Post by SnowHill9902 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #88

Being used to riding motorcycles in the US, why are headlights not always on for all vehicles at this point? LED bulbs last a very long time and there is little reason to not have them on during the day. I know, it’s much more fun to anthropomorphize the car in this case, but the simple solution is to just hard wire them.

You may be approaching a check point and be asked to turn off the outside lights.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#98

Post by chollida1 »

shafyy wrote: post #3

How do you pull over an autonomous car? Like, how does it know that it needs to pull over?

I would assume they have to have it programmed in them to pull over.

They already need to incase of ambulance or fire trucks behind them. That's a day one feature. You see emergency flashing lights you pull over until they pass you.

If they pull over behind you, then that's just a case of lights behind you, pull over and the car remains stopped.

Flashing lights to signal to pull over is one of the most unbreakable of all driving rules, you can't release a self driving car that can't handle that case.

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#99

Post by dotancohen »

jaclaz wrote: post #75
dagw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Swedish at least the 'cruise' when talking about in ships and missiles is the same word, but "cruise control" is a completely different word (literally "speed holder"). You can't "cruise" in you car in Swedish.

In Italy our police cars are much faster, a police car is usually called "volante" (literally "flying"), the more correct name is "autopattuglia" which is more like "patrol car". Then we have the two different animal derived names, police cars are "pantere" (panthers) and the Carabinieri ones are "gazzelle" (gazelles). As well you can't cruise with a car, the cruise control (often untranslated) is a "regolatore di ve…

  > a police car is usually called "volante" (literally "flying")
Don't all cars driven by Italians do that? I think that I've even seen a Punto with a single poor tire on the pavement once. :)

Re: San Francisco cops pull over a Cruise driverless car for no lights on

#100

Post by usrusr »

mobilio wrote: post #46
usrusr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU has a regulation requiring new cars to be equipped with DRL capability, that's all. Laws requiring the use of lights in daytime that exist in some countries are completely unrelated to EU.

Actually this is interesting because manufacturers should make same car but equip it with different parts. Other example is turn signals. On EU they're orange. And when you drive after US imported car here drivers are confused because their turn signals are red. So driver behind don't know does front driver going to stop? DRL - is few bucks, but it's great improvement of road safety.

> DRL - is few bucks, but it's great improvement of road safety.

Only if you ignore all participants in traffic that don't burn through so much energy that a few watts extra aren't an issue. When drivers get everything they feel they need to see conveniently highlighted, attention will inevitably drop to compensate. They certainly know they need to see more than just cars, but the subconscious level only really cares for threats.

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