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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#191

Post by pkulak »

gfodor wrote: post #161

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#192

Post by sean-duffy »

pazra wrote: post #43
1stop wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...

That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.

If the government was willing to pull those kind of tactics to have you killed, I'm pretty sure they could do it without self-driving cars.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#193

Post by ForHackernews »

pkulak wrote: post #191
gfodor wrote: post #161

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#194

Post by jessriedel »

Qworg wrote: post #171
gfodor wrote: post #161

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…

Debris is a really hard problem and I don't think they can get that resolution out of their LIDAR. Camera data may serve better, but that's hit or miss. I'd call this one unsolved. (Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)

Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#195

Post by scoofy »

oceanplexian wrote: post #150
Zigurd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the biking routes are that popular, one side of the street should be a bike lane separated from traffic. Until such time, cars need to be patient. Each one of those cyclists you are stuck behind is keeping a 3 ton multi-kilowatt biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions car off the road. Cars are huge polluters and energy consumers. Would you be equally pissed off if the residents along narrow streets had sp…

Cyclists are using roads that are subsidized and paid for by gasoline taxes and automobile registration fees. If you really want dedicated lanes and preeminence then pay your fair share. I don't think bicycling would be as attractive if cyclists paid for all the externalities of their hobby.

This is nonsense. Roads that cyclists ride on in the states, which are city roads, hardly ever state highways, are paid for via sales tax, not the state gasoline taxes and registration.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#196

Post by pkulak »

josefresco wrote: post #106
Zigurd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

Really? Ever drive on a public road? What percentage of drivers break the speed limit laws? 95%? 7 nines in California? Cops don't even pull you over until you're driving at least 10-15 over. So obviously speeding is a totally fine law to break, but when I roll through a residential stop sign at 5 mph (that has obviously been installed only to enforce right-of-way) what I'm doing is inexcusable?

Until drivers fall all over themselves to apologize for driving 2 tonnes of metal at 80 in a 55, I'm not going to beat myself up for rolling through stop signs (that aren't stopped at for cars either, by the way).

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#198

Post by scoofy »

josefresco wrote: post #106
Zigurd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

Replace bike with car. You seem to think that drivers are not massive traffic law violators? Speeding, double parking, tailgating, failing to signal, need i go on? Expecting an entire group to act like pristine angels before life saving laws can be put in place is asinine at best.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#199

Post by Someone »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #167
gfodor wrote: post #161

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…

My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.

Are they? Visual acuity at the fovea is around 1 arc minute. Translating that to 150 by 100 degrees of visual field (humans have a larger visual field) gives a resolution of 9000 by 6000 pixels.

Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision.

I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#200

Post by scoofy »

theg2 wrote: post #179
josefresco wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

As someone who was nearly run down by a cyclist running a red while I walked a cross walk this weekend, I agree wholeheartedly. Boston is in a constant battle between cyclists and motorists and neither side is playing by the rules.

Yet, you would think that the side of your "battle" with the tendency to kill should be expected to behave better?
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