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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#281

Post by kube-system »

bergenty wrote: post #272
kube-system wrote: post #217

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

Rails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.

Unless the emergency requires moving the vehicle.

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-fire-truck-block-san-fran...

Until we do a better job of solving these issues, we need to have backup drivers available in these vehicles, or, the vehicles should be operating in places where dumb breakdowns don’t block ambulances and fire trucks.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#282

Post by zaarn »

mh- wrote: post #167
Natsu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this make me wonder if something is going on with GPS due to the war in Ukraine?

EDIT: the following is incorrect per a reply below. Will leave the original comment below. --- That was going to be my hypothesis. GPS resolution can be reduced in a conflict area. I'll defer to someone with actual knowledge to add more info. :)

Reduction of GPS Resolution is limited to specific areas, it can be targeted. If they are doing it (probably are in Ukraine) then it only affects some areas. You can also bypass that restriction if you have the right military keys (read: Ukraine).

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#283

Post by mh- »

zaarn wrote: post #282
mh- wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: the following is incorrect per a reply below. Will leave the original comment below. --- That was going to be my hypothesis. GPS resolution can be reduced in a conflict area. I'll defer to someone with actual knowledge to add more info. :)

Reduction of GPS Resolution is limited to specific areas, it can be targeted. If they are doing it (probably are in Ukraine) then it only affects some areas. You can also bypass that restriction if you have the right military keys (read: Ukraine).

Yeah, that is what my (perhaps outdated?) understanding was.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#284

Post by sh4rks »

jchoelt wrote: post #240
mbil wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rode in one recently. It was pretty smooth. An interesting thing: the car slowed to a stop in the middle of the street, and I couldn't immediately tell why. There was a row of parked cars on the roadside, and a person was walking around one of them to open her trunk. I guess the car was able to spot her in the dark and opted to pause. So we were stopped there. The woman threw her hands up as if to say, "whatcha loo…

Now let's imagine the same scene but with the car stopping right next to thugs breaking into another car :-D

Now that you mention it, robbing a self driving car would be easy. Just stand in front of it and it'll stop for you.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#285

Post by zaarn »

mh- wrote: post #283
zaarn wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduction of GPS Resolution is limited to specific areas, it can be targeted. If they are doing it (probably are in Ukraine) then it only affects some areas. You can also bypass that restriction if you have the right military keys (read: Ukraine).

Yeah, that is what my (perhaps outdated?) understanding was.

What is said is the current capabilities. All other GNS systems have the same capabilities (though European GNS Galileo has some more modern features and the Soviet one is a bit of a shitshow)

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#286

Post by yellow_postit »

azov wrote: post #114
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #92

From a customer's perspective, it isn't clear that a software taxi driver is in any way better than a human taxi driver, particularly with (human) driver assist preventing collisions and all the other warnings provided by a modern car. In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence o…

> The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage. With robotaxi you get a driver that: - never gets tired - never gets distracted - never gets drunk - never gets upset - never falls asleep - has reaction time in milliseconds - ... Of course it has tons of problems of its own, but it's not like price is the only advantage over human driver.

Those are also all reasons for competing on price from the perspective of the fleet operator — robos (should) be able to run longer and cheaper than these pesky humans.

I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#287

Post by jrockway »

tjohns wrote: post #79
jerlam wrote: post #45

There is currently some kind of geomagnetic storm which is causing a lot of GPS tracks to be offset over the past few days. It's all over the running/cycling forums. Could be related, here's an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo17e2/the_magnetic...

NOAA doesn't list any meaningful geomagnetic storms right now: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusia... But that aside, I'd really hope that these cars are using professional WAAS-capable GPS receivers. Short of a major X-class flare which knocks out the WAAS geostationary satellites, the entire point of the system is to correct for these kinds of disturbances to the GPS signals.

I'm not really seeing anything weird with GNSS. I have a continuously-operating receiver that writes its location into a database every second; I did a query over the last 30 days and there is no abnormal deviation in position. (My receiver is in a terrible location that can only see a tiny sliver of the sky, and is single-band, so I expect about a +/- 50cm deviation without RTK correction and that's what I'm seeing.)

I actually haven't looked at this data for quite a while. I didn't consider the start of the Ukraine war a good reason to start looking at my data, and I delete it after 30 days to save $$$ on block storage. Dumb. (I added some proper downsampling today so I can keep it forever at reasonable cost.)

Trusting my own data is always suspicious, so I clicked around randomly on the NYS Spatial Reference Network website (https://cors.dot.ny.gov/; the title of the page is "Shop", but accounts and RTK access are free). They operate a bunch of Continuously Operating Reference Stations and publish statistics about the accuracy. I do see a lot of reported GLONASS cycle slips today. I have no idea if that is normal or not; this is the first time I've ever dug that deeply into station stats. But overall, the position accuracy at the stations I spot-checked are within .5cm, which is normal. (Most use 4 constellations; GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo; on 2 bands. So even if GLONASS is broken today, one constellation is enough for good accuracy.)

If the government has degraded GPS accuracy today as many commenters think have happened, many people would have noticed. The reference stations have known positions; if GPS starts saying they're somewhere else, that's impossible and would be flagged. GPS being significantly degraded would probably be front page news; not just noticed by a few exercise tracking enthusiasts on Reddit. Or maybe it's all a big conspiracy and the US and Russia banded together to hack my database and the NYS spatial reference network. It could happen, I guess, but my non expert opinion is that GPS is fine right now.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#288

Post by distrill »

gambiting wrote: post #280
oconnor663 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures. As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so muc…

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

the comparison is disingenuous, but yes, i absolutely would.

"sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers" sounds scary, but if it happens less often than people in the wild, this is absolutely a net gain.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#289

Post by battlebeansbogs »

gambiting wrote: post #280
oconnor663 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures. As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so muc…

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

Yes, I absolutely would. I think a better question is would I want other people to use a bread slicer that chopped my fingers off on average less than they did with a manual version. You might think more highly of your own abilities, but raising the average is worthwhile even if not perfect.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#290

Post by sushid »

gambiting wrote: post #280
oconnor663 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's a cause for concern. It's a perfectly reasonable concern. It's just about certain that early fleets will have big outages for dumb reasons, just like major websites do. The question will be how frequent those are, how dangerous they are, and how effective the mitigations will be as everything matures. As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so muc…

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average". You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

I would if I thought I was worse than the average person at slicing bread. Wouldn't you?
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