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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#121

Post by mschulkind »

plqbfbv wrote: post #106
mschulkind wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

> such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions Because this part is really hard, and that's why Tesla abandoned the fusion approach. You cannot possibly foresee all the conditions in which LIDAR or any active sensor will malfunction/return wrong data/return data that's only slightly off for that ONE specific time. And even if it doesn't, you need to trust it to not return nois…

But why can't you apply all that same logic and processing to LIDAR as well. Maybe we're not there yet, but about about in 5-10 years when we are?

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#122

Post by tintor »

mschulkind wrote: post #84
fastball wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I personally feel like Tesla's approach is more likely to "win". The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing / sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo's.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

The main reason Tesla's don't have LIDAR is hardware cost and maintenance cost, not improved safety.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#123

Post by dhbradshaw »

To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.

Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.

The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#124

Post by mschulkind »

ai-x wrote: post #98
mschulkind wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

I thought about this and I think it boils to how the model is trained. Tesla trains it models from actual drivers purely based on (input) Vision and (output) actuators - Brake, Steering, Accelerators. Human output is based on what they and the camera sees. So, it's a 1:1 match. If Waymo were to do that, it'll muddle the training set. The Lidar input may override camera input. I always struggled when Musk mentioned Li…

This is an interesting viewpoint, but isn't it also solveable?

Just because the human in the scenario only took vision as input, why does that matter to the training data and the model? The actions are the same.

To put it another way, what about all the cultural context the human had, or the sounds, smells, past experiences at the same intersection, etc? Even Tesla can't record this, but I'm not sure that matters.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#125

Post by tintor »

ai-x wrote: post #98
mschulkind wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

I thought about this and I think it boils to how the model is trained. Tesla trains it models from actual drivers purely based on (input) Vision and (output) actuators - Brake, Steering, Accelerators. Human output is based on what they and the camera sees. So, it's a 1:1 match. If Waymo were to do that, it'll muddle the training set. The Lidar input may override camera input. I always struggled when Musk mentioned Li…

The biggest issue with using both camera and lidar is how to properly resolve conflicting returns from different sensor types.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#126

Post by bsimpson »

etempleton wrote: post #90

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going…

Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies.

I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here.

"Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it.

And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#127

Post by mschulkind »

CSMastermind wrote: post #96
mschulkind wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

I got downvoted for saying this last time the topic came up but constraints focus a project. It’s best to start work with as few variables as possible, and only add new ones when absolutely necessary. I'm working on a similar problem in computer vision and we're quickly approaching the point where our pure vision work is better than our Lidar supported track because we've had to deal with the constraints instead of h…

I agree, but these are also the exact constraints that lead to an early leader getting overtaken by a longer term, yet better set of plans. Not saying that's the case here, but given how much success Waymo has had so far, over really everything Tesla has produced, says quite a bit about the likelihood of the approach, even if it's not yet there.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#129

Post by HDThoreaun »

notahacker wrote: post #108
paxys wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence. So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when…

Getting banned from driving is extremely rare. Most people convicted of DUI are still allowed to drive.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#130

Post by tintor »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8
jvanderbot wrote: post #5

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

"assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid"

This is a big assumption.

This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.

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