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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

thelastdriverlicenseholder.com

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#291

Post by StanislavPetrov »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #172
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. :)

I believe the government promised not to ever reduce GPS resolution some 15 years ago, and new satellites supposedly do not even have the ability to do so.

Years ago a government promise and .25 cents could get you a phone call. Today you won't even get the phone call.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#292

Post by CTDOCodebases »

carlmr wrote: post #264
bee_rider wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I could be pessimistic about GPS -- these things are, albeit in limited numbers, on the road and actually being used by customers, right? I guess I'm surprised GPS is so reliable that this isn't a widespread, constant issue, if this is the normal "I lost GPS" behavior.

It could be a middle ground kind of thing. The cars have to trust something . For position you have GPS + some interpolation based on your movement sensors + some buildings/streets and maps (also unreliable since construction etc changes a lot, a lot of buildings and intersections look the same, etc). Computers are very far away from understanding where they are from context alone. Hell most humans don't know where t…

Could it be GPS spoofing that is causing this then?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#293

Post by GekkePrutser »

> The Last Driver License Holder ... has already been born. How Google, Tesla, Apple, Uber & Co will change our lives, cities and destroy jobs. And why this is good this way.

A bit overdramatic IMO. Personally I can't wait until I never have to drive a car again.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#294

Post by Flankk »

carlmr wrote: post #264
bee_rider wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I could be pessimistic about GPS -- these things are, albeit in limited numbers, on the road and actually being used by customers, right? I guess I'm surprised GPS is so reliable that this isn't a widespread, constant issue, if this is the normal "I lost GPS" behavior.

It could be a middle ground kind of thing. The cars have to trust something . For position you have GPS + some interpolation based on your movement sensors + some buildings/streets and maps (also unreliable since construction etc changes a lot, a lot of buildings and intersections look the same, etc). Computers are very far away from understanding where they are from context alone. Hell most humans don't know where t…

Obviously there is no failsafe that pulls the car over, otherwise you would see that the cars had pulled over. This might be annoying on city streets but imagine if it were on the highway. An almost guaranteed 50 car pileup. If history is any guide, this will actually happen in the next few years and be followed by a lawsuit and regulation.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#295

Post by sschueller »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #293

> The Last Driver License Holder ... has already been born. How Google, Tesla, Apple, Uber & Co will change our lives, cities and destroy jobs. And why this is good this way. A bit overdramatic IMO. Personally I can't wait until I never have to drive a car again.

If that means cars replacing public transportation, no thank you.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#296

Post by CTDOCodebases »

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...

People were responding that switching from Glonass to Galileo fixed it. Could it be sabotage?

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#297

Post by sschueller »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #2

Could this just be a simple case of GPS jamming?

Exploit injection via a specially crafted visual "code" a pedestrian flashed at one car that was then picked up by one of the cameras and executed by their ML system resulting in a take over of the entire server. /f

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#298

Post by natch »

jjulius wrote: post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

I suspect these cars having problems in SF are using a centralized solution, so they are dependent on some server.

The better approach is decentralized, with each car built to always fend for itself without a server, imho.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#299

Post by Ekaros »

jjulius wrote: post #96

With all of the talk, usually around Teslas but I suppose it applies to all EVs, that I've seen over the years akin to, "Just imagine how safe driving will be when every vehicle is FSD and can talk to one another," I have to ask... shouldn't we anticipate seeing similar issues to this in that scenario? I mean yeah, there will be different manufacturers so it's not like every car in a city could come to a standstill.…

Now I wonder how is this talking to each other done? Is it some centralized cloud service? Or some type of extremely complicated mesh? Both seem to have quite critical risk factors. It is not unseen for clouds to go down and self-organizing mesh networks might not be the stablest things, or even risk free...

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#300

Post by Peleus »

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 bait and switch with this comparison is you're comparing something you have no control over (bread slicer which randomly malfunctions) against something you have full control over (my own cutting abilities). No one thinks their cutting ability is inferior, so of course they don't want to give up control, because they are (obviously) better than the average human.

If I posed the question as: Would you prefer to place your hand next to a machine which will accidentally cut your finger off once every 100,000 cuts, or a human chef that will accidentally cut your finger off every once every 50,000 cuts, which would you prefer?

I don't know about you, but I'd give the machine a crack.

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