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Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

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Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#271

Post by Spooky23 »

vitus wrote: post #200
energy123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2). Now the errors are not…

I think that's an oversimplification, and helps mainly in the case where one sensor is totally offline. If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? What if the one that says you're about to crash is feeding you bad data? And what if the resulting course correction leads to a different failure? I'd hope that we've learned these lessons from the…

The Elon magic is getting people to bikeshed bullshit like this and ignore the bigger issues.

You don’t gouge out your ears because you hear something walking around at night that doesn’t appear to be accurate. As a human, your executive function makes judgements based on context and what you know. Your eyesight is degraded in the dark, so your brain pays more attention to unexpected sound.

The argument for lidar, sonar or radar isn’t that cameras are “bad”, it’s that they perform very well in circumstances where visual input may not. As an engineer, you have an ethical obligation to consider the use case of the product.

It’s not at all like the 737max issue - many companies have been able to successfully implement these features I have a almost decade old Honda that uses camera and radar sensors to manage adaptive cruise and lane keeping features flawlessly.

In the case of Tesla and their dear leader, they tend to make dogmatic engineering decisions based on personal priorities. They then spackle in legal and astroturf marketing bullshit to dodge accountability. The folly of relying on cameras or putting your headlights inside of a narrow cavity in the car body (cybertruck) is pretty obvious if you live in a place that has winter weather and road salt.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#272

Post by Izkata »

Havoc wrote: post #115
energy123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2). Now the errors are not…

>Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane. Don't think that's the right analogy. Realistically you'd aim to combine them meaningfully. A bit like two eyes gives you depth perception. You assume 1+1 is less than two, when really you'd aim for >2

I remember this being his reasoning for it, that the lidar should be unnecessary if they could get multi-camera depth perception to work like it does in humans.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#273

Post by ben_w »

david38 wrote: post #218
larvaetron wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety. They do if they're crossing railroad tracks.

A narrow case easily accounted for

Enumerating all the narrow edge cases has proven surprisingly difficult.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#274

Post by ModernMech »

redox99 wrote: post #89
tyree731 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this argument, since Tesla regularly updates the software, no one can discuss the weaknesses in their self driving software.

I never said that. Just discuss the current version or at least something recent (any v13 version).

Yeah but you see this goalpost moving all the time when talking Tesla. Every time someone says something is wrong, people will say "But what about the latest version" or "this will be fixed in the next version". Meanwhile, you can still find video on YouTube of cars on the latest version veering into oncoming traffic.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#275

Post by throwaway31131 »

redox99 wrote: post #189
fsh wrote: post #20

This problem has been solved more than a decade ago by radar sensors (standard on many mid-range cars at the time). They detect imminent collisions with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives. Having better sensor data is always going to beat trying to massage crappy data into something useful.

Radars are not as good as you think. They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on. The "with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives" part is not true. If you look at euroncap data, you'll see how most cars are not close to 100 in Safety Assist category (and Teslas with just vision are among the top). And these EuroNCAP…

> They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on.

Radar can absolutely detect a stationary object.

The problem is not, "moving or not moving", it's "is the energy reflected back to the detector," as alluded to by your second qualification.

So something that scatters or absorbs the transmitted energy is hard to measure with radar because the energy doesn't get back to the detector completing the measurement. This is the guiding principle behind stealth.

And, as you mentioned, things with this property naturally occur. For example, trees with low hanging branches and bushes with sparse leaves can be difficult to get an accurate (say within 1 meter) distance measurement from.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#276

Post by [deleted] »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #254
daveguy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Tesla releases all self driving statistics including time since disengagement of self-driving before accident, right?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde... The numbers include all incidents where self-driving was active within 30 seconds of the crash, because of course they do. The meme that Tesla is allowed to simply bypass reporting on a technicality would be absurd if it weren't so voraciously spread by post-truth luddites. Look, if you want to dunk on Elon, I get it, but he does so many real shitty thin…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#277

Post by pwg »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #92

Prediction: over the next 4 years we're going to see lots of stories like this. Some of the stories will be fair, some won't. "Musk bad" stories get clicks. The next administration will be very anti-Tesla. Coincidentally, by that time self-driving will be considered mature enough to warrant proper regulation, rather than the experimental regulation status we have now. Combine the two, and the regulations will be writ…

> Combine the two, and the regulations will be written such that it excludes Tesla and includes Waymo.

The solution seems easier, if only the regulators would pick up upon it.

Under the current human driven auto regime, it is the human that is operating the machine who is liable for any and all accidents.

For a self-driving car, that human driver is now a "passenger". The "operator" of the machine is the software written (or licensed) by the car maker. So the regulation that assures self-driving is up-to-snuff is:

When operating in "self driving" mode, 100% of all liability for any and all accidents rests on the auto manufacturer.

The reason the makers don't seem to care much about the safety of their self driving systems is that they are not the owners of the risk and liability their systems present. Make them own 100% of the risk and liability for "self driving" and all of a sudden they will very much want the self-driving systems to be 100% safe.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#279

Post by smallmancontrov »

toddmorey wrote: post #245
smallmancontrov wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

The argument here isn't against self-driving. Flying is also 100x safer than driving, but there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer. "Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame."

Ok, what other ADAS is driving over 2 billion miles a year?

As for "best technology available," the galaxy brains in this thread are tossing out numbers assuming that sensor fusion never fails and that correlated failure modes can be neglected, which is wild. I never thought Elon was a genius -- he's a business guy willing to make big bets on interesting tech, nothing more nothing less -- but if the confidently incorrect engineering claims on display in this thread are any indication, maybe you guys should be calling him a genius after all, because this ain't it.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#280

Post by ModernMech »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #236
firefoxd wrote: post #183

It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp. That said, what if we make these self driving tools fully available to drivers. Drivers are pretty good at driving already with with relatively short training. Give them the superpowers of teslas like 360 view, predictive object path, and object detection and…

I don’t know why everyone says “just cameras.” Are people imagining they are using some algorithm to detect some object and come up with a distance measure? I’m imagining they are just having the cameras autofocus and determining the focal distance which seems about the same as banking on a good lidar reflection to me.

Consider how long it takes your camera to autofocus, and how sometimes it gets it wrong. Then consider how fast your car moves. In the time it takes your camera to autofocus, how far do you think a car can travel, and what happens to all the blurry things in its path that it can't see?
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