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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#471

Post by mike_hearn »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #238
mike_hearn wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about Tesla's cameras or the "best" cameras? There are smartphone cameras that do depth sensing and HDR, and cameras are cheaper than eyeballs so composing them to get more angular resolution seems OK.

> There are smartphone cameras that do depth sensing and HDR Depth sensing is again, estimated or using time of flight sensors which is pretty much short-range lidar. HDR is used already in AV perception, but still loses to your eyeballs in dynamic range and processing time.

Yes, but human depth sensing is also estimated.

Eyeballs have high dynamic range but with high mode switching times. Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust. Cameras are so cheap you can just have a regular day camera and a dedicated night vision camera together, switching between feeds can be done in milliseconds.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#472

Post by teleforce »

beaugunderson wrote: post #408
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

took two waymo rides in SF and two nightmare cab rides in SF and memphis in the last couple of days. one waymo was perfect, the other ran a red light then stopped in the intersection diagonally across two lanes of traffic until the light turned green. didn't endanger anyone but felt awkward! on the cab ride to SFO my driver kept falling asleep and veering into the next lane, i tried talking with him to keep him awake…

From my (hopefully) neutral point of view I think Waymo running a red traffic light is the worst of all and most likely will end up in a disaster.

For huge metropolitan cities for examples London, Istanbul, Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta or Sao Paulo running a red traffic with a car can most probably cause fatal accidents. I am now more than convinced that level 5 autonomous driving cannot be achieved in my lifetime, and much better efforts should be better directed toward non-invasive highly accurate early detection of high mortality diseases like CVDs and efforts for properly mitigating climate changes.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#473

Post by twright0 »

scottbez1 wrote: post #384
Schiendelman wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it’s almost always legal to stop in a lane. Regardless of the fact that other drivers had bad behavior, that was the right thing to do. Some of the future of all this is that we will need to install curbs in places we don’t have them now to prevent bad human behavior.

This is absolutely false in California, please don't spread dangerous misinformation. See CVC 22400(a): No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, becauseof a grade, or in compliance with law. No person shall bring a vehicle to a complete stop upon a highway so as to impede or b…

The above was referencing stopping on a city street ("Powell between Bush and Sutter"). You're talking about stopping on a highway. These things are not particularly comparable.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#474

Post by nolist_policy »

c22 wrote: post #160
singleshot_ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching. I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.

This is a good point. Do Waymo cars ever use their horn?

They do: https://youtu.be/YxVihk4c-h8?t=3m5s

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#475

Post by rwmj »

archagon wrote: post #149
rwmj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London hopefully. Maybe one day soon I can get rid of my car.

You can’t get rid of your car in London, one of the best public transit cities in the world...?

I don't exactly live in central London.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#476

Post by kajecounterhack »

FireBeyond wrote: post #295
kajecounterhack wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads.…

> For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. This one in itself continues to kinda surprise me. High end Audis have full-blown thermal cameras, and will literally flag heat producing objects on the console: https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electroni...

It's likely because thermal is expensive for the BOM and also wrt energy usage. Also low res.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#477

Post by red75prime »

wetpaws wrote: post #229
itsoktocry wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to "Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years. What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.

>What do you think comes next? Public transport, hopefully.

You need to get rid of excessive solar energy when prices turn negative anyway. So why not charge a fleet of electric taxicabs.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#478

Post by kajecounterhack »

mike_hearn wrote: post #471
kajecounterhack wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are smartphone cameras that do depth sensing and HDR Depth sensing is again, estimated or using time of flight sensors which is pretty much short-range lidar. HDR is used already in AV perception, but still loses to your eyeballs in dynamic range and processing time.

Yes, but human depth sensing is also estimated. Eyeballs have high dynamic range but with high mode switching times. Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust. Cameras are so cheap you can just have a regular day camera and a dedicated night vision camera together, switching between feeds can be done in milliseconds.

> Yes, but human depth sensing is also estimated.

Robots aren't humans. You need accurate depth perception to maneuver a robot precisely, and you need ground truth depth measurements to train learned depth perceivers as well as to understand their overall performance. Humans learn it by combining their other senses and integrating over very long time using very powerful compute hardware (brain). To date, robots learn it best when you just get the raw supervision signal directly using LiDAR.

> Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust

You do realize cameras have the same issue, and that HDR isn't free / is very computationally intensive?

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#479

Post by kajecounterhack »

jessriedel wrote: post #420
kajecounterhack wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every software release is a totally new driver. If they release software at a cadence of say, 6 or 8 weeks, would you feel comfortable riding? You don't know how safe the car was during that time -- any part of the driver can regress. You're basically trusting that they know how to do simulation, that they bore the cost of running that simulation, and that their simulator is realistic enough to yield trustworthy stat…

I’m quite confident in it and personally ride it monthly. Happy to bet it will turn out to be no more than twice as dangerous as the median driver today, ie, as dangerous as driving in the 1980s. In the long term it will be vastly safer, obviously.

I'm glad you feel that way (and I mostly feel the same / ride Waymos frequently), but it doesn't change the reality that you're putting all your faith in a self-regulating company that does not cooperate with regulators more than it absolutely needs to, and where a change in leadership / safety culture / process can cause a catastrophe overnight. And this isn't hyperbole; 1 software push is all that separates a car that crashes in scenario X from one where it was found to not crash in that same scenario. Do you trust the code to be bug free? Do you trust the bugs to be discovered before they maybe kill you?

I have a vested interest in the success of AVs (worked in the industry for the better part of a decade) but the companies building them are far from perfect in terms of how they conduct themselves wrt safety. There needs to be some development in terms of the supporting tech.

The way I think about this is: planes came before the FAA and key technologies that we use to manage flights, such as radar and radio being used in conjunction. AVs are in their "just learned to fly" era.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#480

Post by intended »

IanCal wrote: post #446
gpm wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just wage disparities. You can probably watch the typical video of an individual sitting calmly scrolling on their phone back at 32x speed. More complex scenarios with multiple people at 16-4x. Even assuming they pay 'car monitors' as much as drivers (which you're right, they probably don't) the cost for the monitors is still probably less than 10% the cost for equivalent drivers.

You probably only need to do that when something is reported as well.

Most likely a “data driven sampling methodology to identify the predictive factors of damage.”
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